Bloody Angel
by Atolm2000
Summary: A darker take on Kuja's backstory than many, and a lot of the events leading up to the game. Chapter 7! yes I live! As a ship leaves and Kuja comes to a turningpoint decision in eight words.
1. A creature's reach must exceed its grasp

There is a very simple explanation for this, and it's very close to the explanation for Mark of the Master - After winding up RP'ing Featherboy for a short period, he decided to move into my skull and settle, redecorate a little, and generally park. Now, having a long history of various D&D characters and such doing this to me, this did not bother me so much. Hell, it wasn't even that much of a surprise when Featherboy decided to rattle off his life story. It was when he insisted on having it written down that I realized things had gotten a little out of hand, and in his usual "reach exceeding grasp by 2.5 meters" way, had pushed me over a barrel. It was also, of a sort, a way of poking through exactly what was going on in his feathery little skull, and how he got to where he was during the game.   
Ergo, this fic. 

(If you read this before I reposted it – there's not really much change in the first chapter besides grammar edits.  I largely did the repost game because I got frustrated with ff.net not *updating* pages when I tried to update them; it'd still show the old page no matter how much time I gave it to register or how many times I tried to update it.  I don't know if that's fixed now or not, but I'm in the middle of this anyway, so *shrug*.)  
*****   
A creature's reach should exceed its grasp   
What else is Heaven...or Hell? _- _Lucifer, Leslie Fish   
*****

            Garland shifted the mechanisms; the tube slid down, cables snaking into the walls, leaving a small, six-year-old equivalent form curled on the pad, as the Genomes went about the business of running the lab, paying no mind to the child; it was not part of their programmed task.

            The genomes had originally been meant to have been created and left in stasis, empty vessels for the stored souls of Terra when the world was stable enough to be inhabitable.  However, a lack of resources on the restoration project had made it necessary to activate them as little more than biological automatons; this also gave Garland chances to test the design that was the continuing project of centuries.  

            This new one looked different from the others; the tail - a genetic side effect of the hybridization that had been necessary to make them capable of surviving on Terra as it was now - was covered in soft opal-silver fuzz instead of the golden tan of the others; instead of blonde hair, this one had a similar opal-silver shade of fine, soft, slender feathers.  Bone structure was lighter, almost fragile looking even at this young age.  It seemed the addition of draconic DNA and energy structures to the mix had affected things more than he'd expected.  

            He turned off the "sleep" switch, then waited for the new Genome to stir.  

            The small creature pulled up into a sitting ball, looking up at Garland wide-eyed; there was something off about this one compared to the others, something he couldn't put his finger on.  

            "I don't like it here."

            This was odd - the genomes did not speak until spoken to, unless it came up as part of their program to do so, and certainly were not sentient enough to have opinions.  "What was that?"  

            "I don't like it here.  It's creepy."  The child cocked his head, looking at Garland.  "You're creepy." 

            "I am Garland - your creator."  Most irregular indeed, this one.

           "You're still creepy."  A pause as his attention wandered off Garland.  "Who am I?"  He looked back up, expectantly.

            Was this creature asking for a name?  The genomes didn't have, or need, names.  They were automatons.  This one was supposed to be, as well.  

            "Well?  Who am I?"  The child was getting impatient.  There was a spark in this one, a spark that had never been allowed into the genomes, that wasn't supposed to be in this new design either; this one had a soul, right down to variations in his energy pattern telegraphing emotions.  The creature wasn't supposed to have a name, or a soul, or a mind of its own, but it quite clearly did.  "You...are the prototype of the Kuja template Genome, and you - are a glitch."

            The child squinted up at him, a mix of confusion and wounded pride.  "Kuja?"   

            What was he supposed to do?  The creature insisted on having a name, and until Garland figured out what went wrong, he wasn't using that template, so in the meantime he decided to leave it be.  "Yes.  Kuja."  Old Terran for 'archangel'.

            "What's a glitch?"  

            "A mistake.  Something that was not supposed to happen, that crept into the sytem in spite of tests and plans."  His tone was calm, level, graven, almost mechanical; no malice, although there was a hint of irritated bewilderment.

            Kuja edged further back, towards the wall.  "I'm a mistake?"

            "You are a machine, meant to work on programming; a vessel for another soul.  You are not supposed to have opinions or emotions, yet you have demonstrated that you do; therefore, yes, you are a mistake."

            The child followed Garland around; he wasn't willing to assign a task to the creature yet, so he simply ignored the boy.  Kuja was quiet and curious, watching everything he did with occasional questions about the things that were not included in his programming; odd, that he could ignore all the behavioral programming yet maintain the information stores.  Garland answered the questions offhand, with the same semi-mechanical tone, barely even noticing the child.  Toward the end of the day, the boy started trailing off, then finally asked where he was going to sleep.  

            "What?"  Garland stopped, looking back over his shoulder.

            "I know the genome barracks is thatway, but I'm not like them."

            Garland stared down at the child; it probably would be better to isolate the glitch so he didn't disrupt the others.  He swiftly ran over the maps of Pandemonium kept on file.  "This way."  

            He led the child to a mostly unused storage room, empty except for a pile of blankets and pillows in the corner.  The boy peeked around metal ankles, then scrabbled in, climbing right into the pile of bedding.  

            "I'll bring a cot in."

            "No."

            "What?"  Highly irregular.

            "I like this; it's a nest, and it's softer than the cots."  A feathered head popped up just far enough to peer over the edge at him.  

            This was strange, but it saved Garland the trouble of rearranging the room, and the pile was all unused stuff anyway.  He turned, the biomechanical door mechanisms moving shut behind him.

            He stuck close to Garland, never really keeping the old man's attention beyond quizzical, ruffled looks whenever he did something particularly odd.  For all that he had more information to work with than any normal creature his biological age, he was an awkward mix; a computer's intellect in a six-year-old body with no actual personal experience.  He went through things learning the difference between data and knowledge - between Odonata, four winged nonvenomous predatory insect, and the bright green dragonfly that had somehow survived and gotten into Pandemonium, which he first saw as a bright, swift flash and a whir low over his head.  He had access to an entire database on it, but that didn't stop him from reacting like any small child that had never seen a dragonfly before.  He watched it hover, then fell over tracking it as it zipped back over his head; it stopped again, as if waiting for him to stand back up.  As soon as he had his feet again, it zipped off, and he chased it, urge to try and catch it bolstered by the instincts of a small predator with canine, feline, and draconian in him - it was pretty and it moved just out of reach, so he tried to catch it.  

            It passed through one of the archways to the catwalks over Pandemonium, out into the area surrounding the Bran Bal complex, Kuja chasing it with all the grace, dignity, and coordination of a still-bony kitten.  It skirted Bran Bal village itself, bound out into the buffer areas between it and the poisoned rest of the world; a fragment of his mind knew where the boundaries were and how far he could go before he left inhabitable territory, although he wasn't really listening to it.  He proved he was ignoring it when he charged after the dragonfly - right off a ledge.  

            There was a brief second as the computer and six-year-old snapped into sync, the computer just finishing confirming that he'd run straight into one of the blue patches on the map while the six-year-old felt the sickening lurch of gravity kicking in now that his feet weren't touching ground.  The computer calculated a nine-point-four-six meter drop between the ledge and the water below while the child yelped and clawed wildly to try and catch the wall that was approximately fifty centimeters out of reach by the computer's reckoning.  

            He hit the water with a thick 'bloosh', the waves on the surface of the ten meter deep pool slurping thickly back into place slower than water was supposed to move, due to the odd static energy fields used to keep the buffer area from deteriorating as he sank slower than a rock, to be sure, but faster than the boy wanted to go under.  His reflexes lagged behind his mind as he tried to gasp in a breath before remembering that his lungs, while tweaked to handle poisonous atmospheres, could not process water.  It was thicker than air, seemed thicker than water should be, and the choking reflex that kicked in made it impossible to hold his breath.  He knew in the back of his mind that slashing at the water and struggling wouldn't do much, the same way he'd known that the path ended when he'd run off the cliff; the more he continued sinking, the more he panicked.  

            As his lungs struggled to process the water, his nervous system set off alarms that were picked up by the Pandemonium tracking computers, alerting Garland that not only had the Kuja template prototype moved outside of where he was supposed to be, but that he was three meters underwater off a short cliff and that his respiratory system was flooded and unable to function properly.  

            Garland sighed, setting the system he'd been repairing to pause function, and sent a signal to the computer to have two genomes meet him at the gates with ropes, poles, and a net; there was no real rescue gear, it hadn't been needed in centuries, and Garland's mechanical logic was running in exasperated circles trying to figure out what the Hell had possessed the boy to run off a cliff, as the tracking system had reported; it didn't make any sense.

            Kuja was still slowly sinking, madly trying to flail back to the surface, choking with no air to take in, only more water to replace the water his system was trying to purge.  His vision was blurring around the edges even more than was explained by the water, dark bits creeping in as he was losing what little coordination he had.  

            Something caught the back of his collar, and he felt a sharp prick on the back of his neck, causing him to panic more.  Another something caught his wrist, and he realized how much he'd weakened as he couldn't move his wrist out of the hook.  He then found himself hoisted out of the water, held above it in the loose grip of two hooked poles.  Once he was out of the pool, he quit struggling, too tired to do more than cough up water until he was afraid he'd cough up a lung with it.  He was brought back to the ledge and dropped; somewhere in his spasms of choking it registered that he was in front of a black, bootlike mechanical foot.  

            Garland dismissed the two genomes back to their work.  The child was too busy emptying his lungs to move; much longer and he wouldn't have survived.  When he could breath again, he stayed sprawled, panting, too weak to move.  Garland gave the boy enough time to recover breathing fairly normally, then picked him up by the back of his collar.

            "How did you get here?"

            The boy feebly waved off over the water.  "D...drag....dragonfly..."

            "How did a dragonfly cause you to almost drown?"  Mechanical thinking still wasn't finding the logic behind what happened.

            "Was...was trying...catchit..."  Purple eyes blinked innocently; he was regaining his energy, but was still not feeling up to more than dangling from Garland's clawed hand.  

            "Why?"  The odd exasperated glimmer was showing in force.

            The wind whistling through the child's skull as he tried to find the answer himself was almost audible.  A few more broad, blank blinks passed before he found a semblance of an answer.  "It was pretty, and shiny."

            The exasperation settled out of confusion, into the dry realization that efficiency, logic, and necessity had yet to penetrate the child's feathered skull, and a good explanation was too much to ask.  His claw snapped open, dropping the boy with a brief squall.  As Garland turned to walk away, Kuja paused in a moment of bruised feline dignity, then tried to shake off the water on an odd animalistic flash of instinct; he was on his feet scampering after the edge of Garland's cloak, as if nothing had happened.

            He got into real trouble for the first time another month after that.  Garland left him alone in Pandemonium, traveling to Gaea to check on the Iifa system.  It didn't even occur to him to spare a thought that the boy might get into trouble if left by himself.  

            The first thing to catch his attention was one of the systems running the pathways, platforms, doors and bridges over western Pandemonium.  That the computer in him understood how the system worked only increased the chaos he was capable of.  He set to rewiring it, changing all the passwords, the patterns of the platforms, the activation for the bridges, the on-off times for the barrier shields, and the locks on the doors.  

            Then he got bored with the computer and wandered off, looking for something else to do.  He found one of the genomes repairing an outer wall with a sort of dark blue enamel; the stuff was painted over the biomechanical walls to protect them while they healed.  It also refracted any light that hit it, shimmering like an oil slick on a bright day.  He wandered over, standing under the sweep of the older genome's brush, watching.

            Then he noticed a second brush in the enamel bucket.  He picked it up, watching it drip, then started painting the bottom of the wall haphazardly, leaving long streaks of color.

            "What are you doing?"  The genome had paused in its work to look down at the interference.

            "Helping.", he said simply, still painting the wall.

            "That area is not damaged."

            He paused, staring at the wall.  "It looks pretty now."

            The genome cocked his head, uncomprehending.  Kuja ran down the wall with the brush, then pointed at the shining line.  "See?  Pretty.  Pretty is good.  It's too dark around here."  The genome scanned it.  "Pretty is good?"  Kuja nodded.  The genome, with no further questions, started adding further sections of the wall to his work, the new descriptor somehow getting worked into his task programming.  

            Kuja ran off with the spare brush and the spare enamel bucket, setting to painting things on the walls all over Pandemonium, making haphazard designs and doodles in dripping enamel, writing scrambled bits of verse and graffiti everywhere.  

            He accidentally dumped the bucket off one of the catwalks, spattering enamel everywhere, dripping off walls and railings, spotting his own clothing, face, and feathers.  He could feel the weight on its plumage; it made him itch.  He scrabbled out of that area, looking for something else.  

            In the basement there was a locked door; he'd never paid attention to it before, but now he was bored.  He knew the password after his earlier hacking, so he creaked it open easily, heading into the dark complex.  He wandered in the dank silence for a long time, before he ran into something - a big greenish something that didn't seem to be a part of the wall.  He craned up, finding a huge thing with filmy wings and huge pincers, a big insect.  The data library part of him quipped in that it was a monstrous thing called an Abadon, highly dangerous; it was looking down at him as if he would make a nice snack.  He turned and ran, shrieking, the Abadon chasing him the whole way, tearing through the door into the rest of Pandemonium; he didn't loose it until he slipped into a narrow duct to another part of the fortress.  He climbed from there to one of the upper spires, watching the Abadon take an erratic and frustrated course through the fortress.

            Garland heard the chaos with a sense of dread as he returned; all the computer found out of place was the loose Abadon and the broken door, which the security system was handling.  The genome he'd left fixing cracks in one wall was painting across the wall of the fortress in long stripes with the enamel, and there were huge swathes that were far too erratic to be the work of the genome.  "What are you doing?"

            The genome paused, logic only halfway making connections.  "Making the wall 'pretty'."  The tone suggested that he really didn't understand the word.

            "Why?"

            "Pretty is good."  Again with the vague, hazy sense and the lack of understanding.

            "Who gave you this instruction?"  He already knew.

            "...it was added to my task by Kuja."  Great; the genomes were affording the glitch the same accord they gave him.  

            "Kuja is not fit to give instructions."  Blank response; a mechanical blink.  "He is only a child."  Blink.  "He is reckless and ignores logic and efficiency."  Blink.  Still no understanding.  "He is a glitch in the system."  The genome nodded.  "Clean all of this off the wall except what was put there to repair damage."  The genome padded off to follow his new instructions.

            Then Garland reached the front door, and learned about the hacking and the true extent of the graffiti.

            Kuja had gotten distracted again by how much he could see from the spire, the distant mountains, the stretch of the pale sky, how small Bran Bal village looked.  He could see all the way outside the buffer area.  

            The main Pandemonium computer tugged on his mind, a summons to meet Garland at the door.  He realized how much chaos he'd caused, and when he didn't come to the summons, he heard clanking footsteps in the passage.  

            His main train of thought, as he dove back into the ductwork looking for a hiding place, was a repetition of "Garland's-Going-To-Kill-Me" over and over as he squirmed into a narrow duct in one of the walls.  The side of the wall opened, and a clawed hand caught the back of his shirt, dragging him out despite his best efforts to cling on with all four limbs and his tail.  He was squealing, with an occasional "Please-don't-kill-me" becoming intelligible in the stream.  Garland held him up to eye level in a cold, inorganic frustration, still struggling and squalling.  Then, he blacked out.

            He woke up in his nest of bedding, in his makeshift room, with Garland standing over him.  His back hurt and he had no clue why, and everything seemed disorienting.  

           "It..took...three days...to repair the damage you did.  Four of the genomes were injured by the Abadon you let loose; one almost died.  The computer began crashing due to the confusion you made in its programming, and it is still glitching occasionally.  The enamel requires a special solvent to remove when it's not placed over a damaged wall.  And it added to the annoyance that I had to chase you down.  Why did you do any of this?"

            The wind was whistling through his skull again.  "...I was bored."  

            Garland stared down.  Kuja stared up, as if that was all the explanation he needed.  "You were bored."  The child nodded.  "And that is your whole reason."  Another nod.  "You cannot make disruptions like this."

            "Why?"

            "It disrupts everything; Pandemonium is a delicately balanced system, and is the only reason this area is inhabitable."

            "Why?"

            "Because it runs the systems that control everything; disturbances could destroy everything we work for."

            "Why?"

            "Because all the main controls are centered here; it is because of these systems that this valley is the only inhabitable area on this planet."

            "Why?"

            "Because a disaster a long time ago destroyed the environment, making this planet a wasteland."

            "Why?"  A positively bouncy look was coming over the child.

            It slowly crept into his train of logic that he had just been put over a barrel with an absolute minimum of effort, and that the boy was asking purely to string him along.  He levelled a cold glare at Kuja, who winced with a yelp; there was an actual jab of pain.

            "Because no logic seems to work, I altered your implants; perhaps a deterrent will curb your behavior."  

            A small, puppyish growl started, his tail lashing.  

            "If you don't wish to deal with the pain, then do not cause trouble.", he stated matter-of-factly, almost smug.  

            He tried to act out a few more times; finding the enamel again and painting walls in little-used corridors, trying to confuse the genomes, taking apart things and leaving them - trying to make it look like it had been done by a rat.  Every time, the sharp pain kicked in, letting him know that Garland knew.  He finally trailed off, finding quiet ways to keep busy while casting glares Garland's direction.

*****   
A few mutters from the author...   
I'm not particularly siding either way at this point.  ^_^; Garland, in the game, never seemed as...malicious as he's often written; more apathetic, mechanical, not even recognizing emotions. That's bad enough in its own right. Chibi-Kuja, cute as the little fluffball can be, is a class-one-grade-A amoral *Demon Chibi*; I would not want him in my house. (I can say that I hadn't entirely anticipated how much FUZZ there was in his skull as a kid.)     
That having been said, Garland falling prey to the "Why?" game was just too damn amusing not to include.   The first chapter prob'ly coulda been lighter rated than the rest of the story, but this does get darker kinda fast.


	2. Childhood's over the moment you know you...

Childhood's over the moment you know you're gonna die. - The Crow   
*****

            Things were all dark, except for a gleam of wire.  He was trying to hold still, to avoid the wires, when he felt water welling up around his feet; the water continued rising.  When it reached his knees, he moved to run, to find some high ground in the dark, but all he did was tangle his hand in the wire.  

            Moving, he realized the wire was wound catching his limbs, holding him there as the water rose above his head.  He tried to hold his breath, failed, and started choking, struggling; every move made the wires dig in and start jabs of pain, so he saw blood drifting in the water, as a final wire yanked at his neck like a leash, the water flooding his lungs, he couldn't scream, he couldn't breathe, the more he struggled, the more he hurt and the more the water filled his lungs.  

            He woke up, tangled in the blankets, afraid to go back to sleep; he left his room and padded down the hall.  He found what he knew to be Garland's room; the door opened.

            At first, he ran ahead of his mind.  Garland's mostly mechanical frame was opened and in spread pieces, everything suspended by machinery and wires; he held his breath, waiting for water to rise, not wanting to move.  Nothing happened, and his memory brought up that it was no leash and bindings of garrote, just the self-repair system for keeping up Garland's cybernetics; the red orb, normally in his chest, was in a mount just in front of his body; he noted, confused, that Garland's aura was centered on the orb.  

            "Garland?", he warbled.  There was no response.  Was he dead?  Kuja didn't like Garland, but he didn't want to be alone either.  "Garland?!"   The mechanisms whirred, shifting; the orb pulled back in, as Garland's body pulled back together, then stirred.  

            "What is it?"  He was irritated, and Kuja felt the tingling of the implant.

            "I had a bad dream, and I can't sleep, and I wanted to know if I could sleep in here..."  He was rambling, hurried, afraid he was getting in trouble.  

            Garland stared down, irritated at the disturbance but unable to find anything wrong with the situation, besides the momentary annoyance of having his self-repair cycle disrupted.  He glared down grimly, as the child shrank away.  "Very well."  

            He went back into self-repair; Kuja found the process ghoulish, but at least there was that other aura, another presence so he wasn't alone; he curled up on the floor and dropped off, asleep.

            He was two - eight-equivalent - the first time he saw one of the genomes die.  A wild beast, one of the warped things that lurked outside the Bran Bal compound, had broken in; Garland left Pandemonium to oversee the damages, and he followed.  The area was damaged in the fight, and some of the other genomes were already working on repairs; a torn, unmoving corpse, aura dead, energy bleeding off, was laid out to the side, a trail of blood marking where it had been drug out of the way; the corpse's head was only barely attached.  The dead beast was next to it; on the other side of the dead genome was a genome that was still breathing despite being partly eviscerated.  

            Academically, he knew the injuries, the kind of blow that had likely caused them, the organs visible, what had been damaged and how.  That didn't cover the blood painting the walls like one of his bored scribbles he was always punished for, or the sheer amount of the blood splattered everywhere; the broken sprawl of the corpse; the evil gleam in the dead, staring eyes of the beast; the feeble, ragged breathing of the eviscerated one, the way the body tried to continue working in spite of the fact that its insides were laid out on the stone.  The corpse's eyes were open; the blank, glassy stare wasn't all that different from a living genome.  The wounded one was still apparently awake, keeping the same blank look; Kuja thought he saw a faint ghost of expression - some glimmer of pain through the unmoving bloodied puppet-face, although it could've been his imagination; he wasn't sure which was scarier, if somewhere under the programming and emptiness the genomes actually did feel things, or if they really were just empty vessels with no soul to feel.  

            Garland walked forward, inspecting the injured one, Kuja keeping close in the sweep of his cloak; morbid curiosity aside, he didn't really want to go closer, but he was more afraid to be away from Garland.  The old machine was cold comfort, but he was something, and he was the only other sentient thing in the compound.  

            "Is he dying?", he asked, voice shaking.

            "The damage is past all reasonable repair."  He may as well have been speaking of a broken computer part.  Garland patched into the computer, activating the disposal switch on the damaged genome, then turned away to inspect the beast.  

            Kuja stayed, frozen, as the dying genome's breathing grew more ragged and irregular.  The computer in him knew what the disposal switch caused - rapid tissue breakdown, starting in the less vital systems where the self-repair mechanisms were weaker, swiftly eating away at everything.  Now he started getting an image to go with it.  

            The construct's skin seemed to thin, veins and bone more visible through it, until it started dissolving into a thick, bloody fluid.  Successive layers of tissue followed, muscles being bared before they melted away, the genome still breathing through the first part; after the lungs quit working as the breakdown moved deeper, the patterns of straight blood in the soupy mess showed that the heart was still diligently beating. The bones even were dissolved gradually, calcium-white streaks marbling into the red liquid; he lost track of the movement of attempted circulation in the macabre mess, still rooted dumbly even after the last bit of recognizable remains dissolved among the drenched, blood-dyed remains of torn clothing.  Even with no body left, he still saw a heartbeat in the swirls of the organic soup, his child mind filling in the sign of life though the mass.  His mouth had gone dry, he felt bile rising and somehow didn't get sick; too busy being paralyzed to throw up.  The broad red pool spread in front of him, coating the flat ground, flowing outward around his feet.  

            Heavy metal footsteps disturbed the liquid behind him as Garland walked over, a dark vast shadow falling over him, over the red pool.  He stooped, transfixed, touching the surface, then stood, staring at the blood dripping down his own small hand; the contact confirmed that it was real, that it had actually happened.  

            "Kuja?  The cleanup will be handled as usual."  Curt, businesslike, no reaction to having just dissolved a living creature.

            "Is..."  His voice was a thin, hoarse squeak; he noticed other patterns forming, where Garland must have activated the trigger on the already-dead one, the fluid being easier to clean up than a dead body.  The pool spread further for it.  "Is that...what will happen...when I die?"  There was a damp feeling, a flutter; tears were starting to form, and his stomach had knotted with the connection.  It seemed impossible to just breathe normally, calmly.

            "Yes."  His usual officiousness; he had no time for comforting words or consideration, or even malice; it was the truth, and there was no room in his clockwork plans for dealing with a child's fears, if he even bothered to take the time to comprehend.  

            Kuja's breath caught, slipping ragged, like the dying genome.  He turned and ran for Pandemonium, fearing that he might be mistaken for a broken one if he didn't move, not wanting to face the bone-swirled red pool and the great dark shadow looming over it.  He kept running until he was in his storage-closet room, huddled in his nest of blankets, sobbing.  He uncurled enough to look out across the room, his room, the one place in Pandemonium he could try and turn into something that looked lived in.  His eyes caught a mirror, and the images caught him without escape; bloody soup drenching crumbling silver feathers, his amethyst eyes dissolving, the skull visible briefly before it would dissolve as well...he violently wrenched back into fetal position, clutching and tangling into the blankets, the blood on his left hand getting smeared all over him and the bedding.  He'd never be able to look at the ghastly forms of Pandemonium again without seeing something dying and decomposing - and wasn't that what it and the rest of this world were?

            The door slithered open.  "Kuja?"  Garland actually seemed confused, perturbed at this new disturbance in his clockwork world.  Kuja gasped between sobs, not finding the air or will to speak.  "What's gotten into you?"

            "Am I broken?"  Garland had always called him a mistake; how long would Garland leave the mistake before he deemed it time to dispose of it?  

            "Aside from the glitch of a soul, you seem intact."  

            "If I get hurt, will you....will you...just...dispose of me like that?"  He was speaking rapidly between sobs.

            "If the damage is beyond reasonable repair."

            "I don't want to die!", he yelled, howling.  "I don't want to die, I don't want to, to, to just dissolve like that!"

            Garland had nothing close to a suitable answer, nor a response to this outburst, so he did the efficient thing and left to do something more useful.  

            Kuja tangled himself deeper in the blankets, crying, using the cloth tension to make sure he was still solid.  He knew it for sure now; when he saw the bloody pool with Garland's looming shadow, he'd seen his future.

            For some time after the incident, Kuja was unusually subdued and skittish, scrambling through things in between bouts of freezing.  He was torn between being terrified of Garland, his creator, the one that controlled his implants and the shadow of his death, and just wanting someone, anyone, nearby.  The genomes were no use; their programming had been adjusted to ignore the glitch, particularly when he was disrupting their work.  The only other thing that had any kind of response was Garland.  

            The nightmares started in earnest, going from normal, sporadic childhood bad dreams to night frights and panic attacks.  The waters around the garrote wires turned to blood, blood from other creations of Garland's being disposed of; instead of being alone in the wire net, he was joined by melting corpses.  For a few months, he spent more nights at Garland's feet than in his own room.  Garland didn't even seem to notice any of it, besides a slowly increasing irritation at having his self-repair cycles interrupted, to the point that he ordered Kuja not to disturb him when he came in to get away from the night frights.  He still caught the references - he was a glitch, a mistake, not supposed to exist.  

            One morning, Garland gave him a lengthy section of computer code to debug - the first time Garland had told him to do something.  Then, Garland left, his annual trip to Gaea, to check on the Iifa System.  

            Kuja turned to the convoluted bit, going over it line by line, glyphs covering the force-screen in front of him at a high rate.  It was busy work, something to concentrate on, but it was interesting for the first couple hours.  

            Then his attention wandered.  Another hour and he was bored with it.  He stood from the screen, leaving it stopped, and headed for the door into the Bran Bal complex.  

            There was a warning tingle as he approached the door; it wouldn't open, so he tried to rewire it.  As soon as he touched the mechanisms, there was a sharp pull of pain, the implant's metaphorical leash being yanked.   According to Pandemonium's main computer, Garland had set it up to monitor Kuja's actions in his absence, with temporary control over the implant.

            He glowered at the door.  He could go back to the debugging quietly, but that would mean admitting defeat; the door and implant became the major test of whether or not he'd let it get the better of him.  

            He practically attacked the mechanism, working through the constant sharp sensation of the implant; the final mess was haphazard, more damage than hacked, but the door opened.  He stumbled through, the implant's torment getting worse the further he moved from the door; his head swam, but he pushed forward, refusing to give in.  He got fifteen feet before he blacked out from the strain, collapsing unconscious.  

            He woke up back in the chamber, with Garland standing over him.  The implant was off, but he still felt tingling and twinging along most of his nerves.  

            "Why did you do that?"  

            The boy hauled himself up, sitting, tail twitching.  "I didn't want to stay here.  It was boring."

            "You are not going to be allowed to run amuck as you have in the past; what you want does not enter into it."

            "I still got outside."

            "Fifteen feet."

            "It was outside!"  The small growl was starting again.  

            Garland stared down coolly.  "The boundaries on your behavior are very real.  You will be controlled."

            His tail was lashing; he was snarling.  Garland turned and left the sulking, fuming child.  

            Kuja attacked the boundaries with renewed resolve.  He went out of his way to confuse the genomes and scramble their programming, until Garland banned him from entering Bran Bal, setting the tracking system to activate his implant if he tried; he fought it for a month, much the way he'd fought the door.  

            He didn't even leave a period of peace before he started a different tack - sabotaging whatever was handy whenever Garland wasn't looking.  Every time there was the bite of the implant, but it was becoming less of a deterrent; it was a sign that he'd broken another boundary.  

            Garland ended the string when he caught Kuja after an elaborate sabotage run.  The implant came on strongly enough that it drove the child to his knees, suddenly; when the flashes in his vision cleared, he was staring, yet again, at Garland's ankles.

            "I may not be able to take readings, monitor energy systems, and study your glitch properly when you are unconscious, but I can just as easily study it while you are permanently restrained."  There was more of an irritated edge in his voice than Kuja had ever heard.  "One more outburst, and allowing you movement will become a liability."  Garland turned and left; the door into the corridor hissed closed, leaving Kuja alone, in the dark hallway, on his hands and knees.  

            He'd found the end of the leash; one more boundary crossed, and he'd be tied down in one of the labs and kept that way.  He liked being able to move around and see different things, and he didn't want to give that up.  He didn't doubt that Garland would make good on the threat.  He'd always wanted to get some kind of proof that Garland really had emotions, but now that he had it, he regretted it.  

            He stood up and went to his room, and mostly stayed there for days, until he felt safe following Garland again.  He went subdued again, quiet, afraid of Garland as more than just his eventual death; he could not defy Garland, not without consequences he dared not face, no matter how much he hated being yanked underfoot like that.  He wasn't like the genomes; he didn't want to be treated like them.  Someday, he would break the leash, but for now, he had no other choice but to quietly go along, with no more sign of how much he hated things than glares and quiet growls, sullen tones; so long as he did not actually do anything, he could be as obvious as he wanted about hating Garland.  

            The open hatred seemed to die down gradually, but not because it was flagging; it was simply being pulled into the shadows, to wait.  

            His usual mischief being outlawed, he set to other things to do; digging through computer archives for reading material, practicing playing with magic, tinkering on broken or cast-aside bits of machinery.  Time went on as Pandemonium and Bran Bal settled back into usual patterns, although he'd stopped going to Garland when he had nightmares; Garland was one of his nightmares anyway, so he started just huddling into the blankets listening to the fortress breathe.

*****   
The disposal switch was never meant to be the killswitch activated at the end of the game, ergo why it doesn't quite work the same...it just sorta...nagged at me and wouldn't go away, of having a mechanism meant to dispose of corpses without burial, carrion, etc. as well as the "shut-down" mechanism and the "standby/sleep" button. The manifestation being that horrific was...added bonus isn't quite the word here, but it serves its purpose. :P The blurring of time's also sort-of intentional, since the frigging place never *changes*.  


	3. Would you ever want to see an angel?

Have you ever noticed, in the Bible, that whenever God wanted someone   
punished, or whenever God needed a killing, He sent an angel? Did you   
ever wonder what a creature like that must be like - the whole of existence   
spent praising your God with one wing dipped in blood?   
Would you ever want to see an angel?   
- The Prophecy   
*****

            The sun?  He looked up and around, squinting and blinking; he was outside, on the path to Bran Bal, with not even a tingle from the implant.  The restrictions had been relaxed; he was allowed outside.  He leaned back in the sun, watching the thin sky for the first time in months.  

            His first impulse was to go bouncing into Bran Bal, as usual, poking into things and playing the "Why?" game until the genome's programming crashed, rearranging things and seeing how he could change or mess up the pattern - then he anticipated the sting of the implant, and Garland's threat.  

            He stared off toward Bran Bal, sighed, and turned to slink back into Pandemonium and his robot, the dark corridors and empty halls.  

            A week before Garland's next annual trip to the Iifa system, Kuja was sitting in a main junction, trying to get all four of the robot's spidery biomechanical legs to work.  It registered behind his focus that Garland had entered.  A few minutes later, it registered that Garland had not left.  He glanced up, briefly; Garland was watching him with a strange intensity.  He stopped working and looked up.  "What is it?"

            "Are you aware of the...problems appearing in coordination between Pandemonium and Iifa?"  

            "Pandemonium's going to run out of resources in seventy three years, while the Iifa system needs another two hundred."  He started tweaking his robot again.  He knew what was going on because he had been reading just about everything he could get his hands on; he didn't particularly care.

            "It is possible to alter the rate of the Iifa system, but it would require personal intervention, and if I were to leave Pandemonium for the amount of time it would require, the system here would begin to fail faster."

            "Can't one of the genomes do it?"  He was barely paying attention to Garland.  

            "No; they only work on programming, and this is a case that will require deciding what to alter at the site."

            So Garland couldn't, neither could the genomes...

            He stopped, setting down the twitching robot.  "You want me to go?"  This was something big, something important to Garland, and he was actually being trusted.  He was caught between fear and abuse, and that he was actually being trusted.  

            "It seems to be the only logical option."  Tinges of resignation.

            "This isn't like that boring program you had me fixing last time you left, is it?"  He cocked his head.

            "That was something to keep you occupied.  It could just as easily have been done by a normal genome, but you were available, had nothing better to do, and I had hoped it would keep you from causing trouble.  This...this is something that might determine the fate of our world."  Garland hated the horrendous risk he was taking, but saw no other choice; something had to be done as soon as possible.  "In a few days, you will go to the Iifa system briefly, to do the annual check.  After that, you will be expected to travel back and forth, eventually remaining on Gaea to oversee the system locally and implement support systems."

            Getting out of Pandemonium, having something to do...now he was truly interested.  "Support systems?"  

            "In order to speed up the Iifa system, the cycle of souls on Gaea must be speeded up, disrupted, and brought to a stop."  He paused, hints of dry, cynical humor sneaking in, barely.  "This seems to be something that would come easily to you."

            "So I go there and cause trouble?"  That was what Garland called most of what he wanted to do anyway.  

            "You go there and bring about the death of the world.  Your name means angel - a creature created for a specific purpose, that exists solely for its duty.  You have defied all other orders; you are destructive, erratic, stubborn.  Yet, what makes you ill-suited for all other purposes makes you suited to this.  Therefore, you are to be an angel of death."  

            To him, it translated simply; he was being pointed in a direction and let off the leash.  

            On the day of the annual check, he paused in front of the portal in Bran Bal, as the genomes went about their business around him.  Garland was going about his business, back at Pandemonium; it would be inefficient to take time away to oversee this, and the whole purpose of getting Kuja to do it was so he would be free to watch over the fortress.  

            The portal only showed glimmers of the gateway on the other side, which led straight out onto the branches; why it wasn't at the actual entrance to the Iifa complex, he didn't know.  The image was too indistinct for him to tell much.  This would be the furthest he'd ever gone, and Gaea was not the static, climate-controlled, carefully monitored outpost that Bran Bal and Pandemonium were; it was a living planet, with winds and flowing water, plants and animals that were not carefully monitored in cages or hydroponics tanks.  It was scary, to be standing on the threshold of a place so...different, so wild, and with so much unknown.  

            So much unknown...maybe even a way to eventually defy Garland, a way to cheat death.  He walked forward, into the portal.

            Between one step and the next, there was a sickening lurch, and an endless falling sensation, as the chaos between dimensions flowed past.  Then, there was the jar of solid ground again, the sound of bark and dirt falling from under his feet.

            The first thing he noticed was the overpowering aura of the planet; it was like someone had set off a blue flash-bang in the back of his skull, and then left it on.  It took him almost twenty minutes to adjust, and when he did, he realized he was flat on his back, sprawled on the broad branch.  There was so much life, so much energy, that it was blinding.  The continual ebb and flow, all the auras and streams.  There was a specific system he could pick out, the Iifa system catching dead souls, processing the life energy released on death, converting what it couldn't use into a sort of spirit-toxin, usable for other things.  

            Wind was moving through the branches, ruffling his feathers and shifting his clothing.  The cloudless sky between the branches was a deeper shade of blue than he had ever seen on Terra, and the wheeling shapes of birds could be seen high above.  The air was different, indescribably different from the stagnant air of Terra.  

            He pulled to his feet, noticing an odd aura below, by the actual gate; he ran down the huge root.  His job could wait a few minutes.  At the entrance, he noticed a monolithic statue of a sea serpent raised in a hiss on a platform of surviving earth, a ledge overlooking the vast ocean, more water than he'd ever wanted to see in one place.  The statue's eyes were gleaming dark red, and lines along its scales glimmered pale blue.  The statue was alive, a spirit plainly present; he got the impression it was watching him.  He reached with his power to get some sense of it.

            The spirit he touched was something vast and huge; he had the impression of endless shifting coils, broad fins, a narrow toothy head, gleaming eyes, the rushing waves of the ocean directed by an unfathomable mind; after almost drowning in the still, shallow waters of Terra, this was beyond terrifying. 

            'Who Are You?'  The waves and rumbling serpent-growls formed words that echoed in his head.  

            "K-kuja..."  He was somewhat aware that he was kneeling just beside the statue, but his attention was fixed on the contact.

            'What Are You Doing Here?'  The serpent-eyes were fixed on him, unblinking.

            "Checking on the Iifa System..."

            'You Are One Of Them?'  It sounded annoyed.

            "What are you?"

            'I Am Leviathan, Eidolon Of The Endless Depths, The Rage Of The Stormy Sea.'

            "Why are you here?"  He pulled out, sitting cross-legged.

            'I Am Bound Here As The Guardian Of This Place, To Tame The Wild Storms And Prevent Interference With The Ancient Tree.'  It growled.  'Even The Summoners That Bound Me Do Not Realize The Truth About This Tree, And What Your People Are Doing; If They Did, They Would Have Allowed Me To Release The Rage Of The Seas Upon Your Foul Tree.' 

            He shifted, uncomfortably under the cold gaze.  "So you're stuck?"

            'Why Did Your People Send A Child?'

            "...There was no one else..."

            'You And That Foul Dark Creature Are All There Are?'  Leviathan was clearly surprised, and taken aback.

            "Yeah..."

            'Why Do You Seek To Destroy Gaea?'

            "So Terra will live again.  It's kinda dead now."

            'Why Do You Serve The Dark One?'

            "Because...", he started to answer, but was finding few really good reasons.  "Because I'm afraid of him..."  He started tracing designs in the dirt on the branch.  

            'Why Do You Fear Him?'  It was starting to sound almost sympathetic, the tempest in his mind calming a little.  It was the first time something had talked to him; when he opened his mouth, everything came out in a torrent.

            "Because I'm a glitch, an'he only keeps me around really to figure out what happened, an'if I don't do what he says, he'll tie me down to study me without me getting into trouble - he said he would after I kinda wrecked Pandemonium, an' when he's done with that, if he doesn't have another use for me, he'll get rid of me."

            'Get Rid Of You?'  The tempest turned to warmer seas, and he could almost feel coils settling around him, but not in any kind of threat.  

            "It's..he'll..."  The image of the dead genome melting, with the mirror-view of his own face...he started crying, and dove at the monolith, throwing his arms around the source of the presence; he was suddenly shocked, and thrown back.  

            'Apologies...Until Something Is Done About The Accursed Tree, Or I Am Released, I Cannot Remove The Binding.'

            "I better go...if I take too long to check on the Iifa system, Garland might get mad at me."  Kuja got to his feet.

            'Do You Know What The Tree Is Doing To Our World?'

            He nodded.  "It's redirecting the souls of Gaea as things die, storing some of the lifeforce released to power the system, releasing the rest as part of the programming to disrupt the cycle of souls further."

            'It Is Killing Our World.  Shut It Down.'

            "Garland would be mad at me, and maintaining it is the only way I can leave Pandemonium."

            'If You Help It, You Will Be My Enemy.'

            The wind blew his feathers in his face; he pushed them aside.  "You don't have control over my killswitches, and you're stuck there - you can't do anything to me."   

            He broke off the contact, aware of Leviathan howling in rage, and ran up the root.

            The entrance was further than he had expected; he was actually winded by the time he got to the opening into the tree.  Passing the threshold, he crossed from the living tree facade to the truer face of the Iifa system - a rotted out hollow with a biomechanical lift down, dead things scrabbling into cracks, pulled to a mimicry of life by the dark energy of the tree.  The forces animating them were murky, rot-tasting powers, creepy but somehow fascinating.  

            He boarded the lift, and was taken down into the tree, to a platform below; over the edge was a green light and a shaft down.  The green light was where the tree's core was, drawn from Terra.  He stepped onto the broad leaf, trying to ignore the rotting corpses scuttling in the shadows.  

            The leaf moved down the shaft so quickly that he braced himself before he realized that it had a field keeping normal inertia, wind, and gravity from sweeping him off.  At the bottom, it stopped swiftly, on a ledge that could've been taken straight out of Pandemonium.  He walked to the edge, sending an energy signal that acted as a password.

            A thing, a cross between a tree and a corpse, rose to greet him, towering over him.  It made its report mechanically; he then set to ordering adjustments, tweaking energy flows, and doing maintenance.

            The task took a few hours of working with the tree-beast, at the end of which it opened a return portal to Bran Bal.  He dismissed it and walked through.

            The lurching fall came again, although he was prepared for it this time.  On arriving in Terra, he couldn't help but notice how...dead it felt compared to Gaea.  In many ways, it was closer to the reanimated corpses than anything else; an undead planet.  It was uncomfortable to go back to.  He considered going to Garland, but decided against it.  He put the new data into the computer, and went back to his usual routine, retrieving the small robot that was scrabbling half-made and half-programmed around his room and sitting to work on it.  

            For the better part of the next three years, he flitted back and forth between Bran Bal and Gaea, setting up so the various systems recognized him; every corner of the Iifa itself, some of the monsters it warped and spawned, the four shrines that sealed the main connection to Terra and the guardian of Ipsen's Castle where the keys were stored.  Garland spared enough attention to set up a place to stay in a cavern near the Iifa, with teleporters between it and a makeshift airship dock; the cavern itself had no passages to the surface.  

            Kuja gradually started moving his trinkets and bits into the cave; the Mists blew through it and it was monster-haunted, although he was immune to the Mist and his cave had security systems to keep the monsters out.  Despite the rumblings of strange beasts through the caverns, he still found it more comfortable than the decaying stasis of Pandemonium.  The growls, scrapes, and echoes were more comforting than the silence and whispers of biomachinery; they proved there was something alive out there.  He was far from self-sufficient, but he spent most of his time there anyway.  The shifting seasons kept time those years, drawing lines that contrasted with the timeless stasis of Terra. 


	4. Hell is an empty house haunted by a chil...

Enter Zidane...   
*****   
Every injured soul   
Needs a silent hand to hold   
Someone to break   
Pleading for the heart to hate   
Hell is an empty house haunted by a child's voice - Patience Worth, Faith and the Muse   
*****

            It was when he came back from his fifth yearly trip to the Iifa system that he found a surprise waiting.  He came into Pandemonium and started putting the new data into the computer.  When he finished, he realized he was not alone.  He turned, expecting Garland, but this presence was far from looming; in a rare moment, Kuja found himself looking down - being the equivalent of fourteen, he was still not quite as tall as most others around him.  

            "Watcha doing?"  The younger child looked like any other young genome, except that he was rocking up on his heels and gripping the panel, struggling to see better.  

            "Putting..in...the report...from the Iifa system."  Kuja was staring in bewilderment at the little creature.

            The younger child looked up at him wide eyed; he took a step back.  

            "You're funny.  Why do you have feathers?"  Kuja as a boy garbled a response, fidgeting with the ones that tended to fall forward.  The memory bank kicked in a second later.  "It's...I'm...er....dragon feathers."

            "You're a dragon?!"  The littler boy bounced forward, batting at Kuja's feathers; Kuja stumbled backward, falling over, the younger boy falling over with him.  It quickly descended into a scuffle, kicking up dust and raising a racket.  

            Both children heard Garland clear his throat; in a split second, they were two feet apart, straightening clothing and trying to look innocent.  The younger boy pointed over at Kuja, proclaiming, "He started it!"

            "Did not!"  Kuja snapped to glare at the smaller boy, tail lashing.  

            "Both of you, quiet!", Garland snapped.  Kuja cringed, backing away, feathers flattening; the new child looked down at the ground, fidgeting.

            "What's he doing here?"  Kuja nodded at the other child.  "I thought I was a glitch, so why'd you make another one?  Is he a mistake too?"

            "You must screw up a lot.", the new one added.  Kuja made another puppy-growl; he didn't need his sentences finished, nor did he need someone else making Garland mad.  

            "This is the result of an attempt at finding the variables in your genetic and energetic makeup that led to the glitch; it seems to be more of an auric glitch than a physical one."  Kuja edged back again at that; his new sibling was sitting on the ground, drawing in the dust, not paying attention.

            "Does this mean you're going to get rid of me?"  

            "You're still necessary to coordinate the Gaean systems, and I am still ascertaining the nature of the auric glitch and how it can be prevented."

            "So you're not going to get rid of me?"

            "Yet."  

            "What do you mean 'yet'?"

            "You are to be maintained until a suitable replacement is ready."

            Replacement.  Garland was only keeping him out of necessity, and as soon as he had a replacement, Kuja would be 'gotten rid of'.  Garland was going to kill him.  The presence of the other child took on a whole ominous new cast.

            "Is this my replacement?"  He pointed at the young child, who suddenly grew uncomfortable.   

            "Possibly."  Garland didn't quite want to say for sure, not with Kuja's demonstrated vindictive streak, but Kuja knew anyway; there was almost no other reason to create another 'glitch'.  

            "Wait...replacement?  What's going on?"  

            Kuja glared down at the other boy, who was looking up at him in confusion, turned quickly, and ducked through the portal to his room in the caves on Gaea.  

            He quietly kept up his work on moving in and tweaking the Iifa system for a couple weeks, only going back to Pandemonium briefly now and then to bring in data or collect something he needed.  It was partly a calculated move, to ensure Garland wasn't paying as much attention to him.

            He also snuck a bit more out of Pandemonium's computers than was needed for his job - the tracking information on his replacement,  where the boy was likely to be at any given time, and when he'd be away from Garland.  The attention span and curiosity were familiar, and Kuja was already figuring out a way to take advantage of it, particularly after getting pounced a few times with torrents of questions about where he was going.

            Finally, one day, he set the portal to open to a random location on Gaea and stay open under his control, walked through, and waited.  It was a sea cliff on the other side of the southwest continent from Ipsen's, looking over the sweeping ocean; closer to something of Terra than he had wanted, but nothing he couldn't cover with a bit of hacking.  

            He'd deliberately picked a time when Garland would be busy and his rival would be rattling around Bran Bal.  Sure enough, maybe ten minutes after he'd settled in to wait, his replacement walked through.

            The younger genome weaved drunkenly for a minute, then fell against a large rock, disoriented by the shift.  Kuja figured the shock would be worse for someone younger; it looked like he was home free.  He quietly walked back to the portal, already setting up a program to alter the data from the portal so it would look like a random glitch and reveal no involvement on his part.  

            "You're not going to leave me here!"  He was sent staggering a few steps by an impact from behind; the younger boy had managed, somehow, to pull out of the shock enough to latch on to his shoulder.

            "Yes I am!  Let go of me!"  He was trying to shove the other boy off of him, but the smaller child was scrambling to stay leeched to his shoulder, clinging on to him completely.  Kuja let loose a half-formed lightning spell, jolting the other boy off him and throwing him back to the cliff edge; the child scrabbled, unsteady, then lost footing and fell over the edge, half-conscious.  

            Kuja paused, holding his breath; he heard his replacement hit the water below, then just the waves, the wind, and the sea-birds.  He crept cautiously to the edge and looked over; there was no sign of the other genome.  He set his hacking program to cover his tracks and ran back through the portal.  

            On the other side, he literally ran straight into Garland, falling back from the impact.

            "You've covered your tracks on the portal system, I see.  However, you forgot Pandemonium's tracking sensors."  Garland picked him up by the back of his collar, although he was no longer dangling quite so much.  "Where is he?"

            "I don't know."  A jab from the implant.

            "Where did you leave him?"

            "He fell off a cliff into the ocean, and I don't know exactly where the portal was."  He knew he was in deep shit, but he was glaring back anyway, because he had an ace in the hole now.  "You can't do anything to me - you need me."

            Garland stared back coldly.  "The Iifa System can run without supervision for another two weeks."  Kuja blacked out.

            He woke up in one of Pandemonium's basement labs.  He was restrained back, unable to move, the odd semi-living cables from the walls binding him to a device set in the wall.  There were a couple of the lines from the device running into his wrists and the back and sides of his neck.  He could actually feel the lines running into his spine at the base of his neck, along and inside it; lines along his arms and through his veins.  The room was dark; he could barely make out the spread of the dark, empty lab, the machinery and tables littering the room.  He could barely see shapes of other devices, not enough to tell what they were.  There was no sign of Garland or anyone else; he was alone in the basement.  There was an odd itch along his back just above his shoulder blades, and down the center of his back; it felt uncomfortably like some kind of straight, precise cut.  His tail was kinked in three places, wound through the machinery in back.  He heard a sort of low, thin whine, then realized it was his own.  There were occasional tugs on the edges of his aura, a biting sensation that wasn't actually there.  

            He wanted to lose track of time. He wanted to fall asleep, something so he wouldn't be watching the dark and thinking about what he was in the middle of.  However, the computer in the back of his mind was methodically ticking off the minutes and hours.  He didn't need to sleep much, and just what he could see and sense was enough to keep him on nerves.  Bits and images were creeping into his mind, picturing what horrors the devices in the lab were, and what Garland was planning to do to him - Hell, what Garland had already done to him that he didn't know about.  

            The hours ticked by; he was starting to feel stiff from not moving for so long.  By the clock, it would be late in the day outside; in the lab, there was no change, just the dim feeling of the fortress breathing.  He couldn't even access the computers to see if Garland or any of the genomes were anywhere nearby; he'd been locked out. 

            Some time after sunrise, the lights came up enough to see, as one of the doors outside his range of vision slithered open.  He twitched, struggling, trying to move enough to see, but the curved, biomechanical planes of the device blocked his vision, and trying to move only made the cables and lines pull and tug painfully; not only was there the pain of the lines were they entered, but he could feel the movement under his skin as they shifted and then moved back into place, struggling right back; he fought down a whimper as he heard heavy footsteps still outside his field of view.  He wasn't sure anymore if the device was on a wall of the lab or a pillar, or its own alcove in some permutation thereof.  

            "Garland?"  There was much more of a thin quake to his voice than he'd thought.  

            The footsteps stopped, and something was being moved; was it some other device, a panel on this one, or something else?  He heard a computer terminal turning on, something being worked on.  "Garland?"  Still no answer.  He was starting to feel sick, but it wasn't really nausea; more of a knotted sense, something cold and hollow and heavy.  His mouth had gone dry.  Was Garland just checking the data gathered, or was he setting something up?  How long had he been down here?  His internal clock only tracked hours, not days, and he'd been unconscious, so there was nothing to remember to place it.  Was his time down here up?  "How long have I been down here?"  His voice sounded very small even to him, small and shaky.  

            "A day and a half."  Cold, curt, and next to emotionless - typical Garland.  A day and a half, out of fourteen.  

            The terminal he couldn't see quieted, and the biting that wasn't there grew stronger; instead of a sort of nibbling at his aura, it was a snatching and tearing.  His vision was swimming through it all, and all the stiff aches and pains were going numb, replaced by the rending that wasn't physically happening.  

            It shifted, to something closer to being turned inside out, and he could feel the machine going over every fiber of what he was while he was inside out.  He was pretty sure he screamed, but he only half heard it; he was aware, but his body wasn't really responding, his physical senses were fuzzing out.  

            Then it snapped back, the machine finished, leaving him hanging limply in the device, the involuntary whine back, higher and thinner.  He heard the footsteps again, and choked it back, fighting to keep quiet and not shake; he stopped the whine, but was still trembling, fighting to keep his breathing even.  All the little aches and pains were back with a vengeance; he kept his eyes closed as the footsteps came around, to one side of him, five feet away, around, he could hear Garland's cloak moving, close enough to just barely feel the air stir with movement.  

            He opened his eyes and looked up.  Garland was studying him, brows furrowed, mechanical logic trying to analyze a glitch that should not exist and did not follow methodical, cold reasoning.  There were passing ghosts of irritation, but they were drowned out in the hollow clicking logic.  There still wasn't even enough room for real malice in the computer confusion; Garland showed just enough emotion to prove that, sometime in Terra's dim past, he'd been a living creature, but those ancient ghosts still weren't strong enough to penetrate the clockwork dust.

            And the only ghosts Kuja had ever managed to bring forward were the vicious ones, the contempt and frustrated anger, still filtered through a machine that had forsaken a soul.  

            "What...was...that?"  It took effort for the boy to string words together, but he was feeling too drained to be afraid and too defiant to just quietly go along.  Maybe if he kept talking, kept asking questions, Garland would start piecing together that he wasn't just a machine to take apart and ponder when it did something unexpected.  There was still enough childhood in him to think it might be possible.  At the same time, every question was another strike at the attempts to break him into another machine.

            "That was an attempt at analyzing the structure of your aura core to determine where the glitch started."  Spiritual vivisection, from a mind that didn't understand pain.  Kuja wasn't sure if that idea, that Garland didn't understand emotion enough to be sadistic, was comforting or terrifying.  

            "Are you...going to do that again?"  He didn't have the energy to summon his bravado yet.

            "Unnecessary, unless there is some sudden shift extreme enough to warrant re-mapping."  

            "I want out of here."

            "What you want is irrelevant."

            "I want out of here!"  He started to struggle, even though he wasn't able to do anything; it hurt, but he was going to try and bull through it like he had the shock-collar implant. 

            The mechanical confusion grew a bit more exasperated.  "Why do you want out?"  

            "Because this hurts!  This hurts, and not being able to move hurts, and this place is dark and horrible and I don't like it!"

            "Pain is irrelevant.  Your glitch has proved to cause damage, and must be restrained, analyzed, and prevented from causing damage; your rebellion and destructive nature defies logic."

            "I hurt and I don't want to die!"  He was snarling, screaming and fighting.  Some of the cabling was starting to come loose.  

            Garland's eyes narrowed.  "Cease this."

            "LET ME GO!"  The cry echoed off through the basement of the fortress.  

            Garland reached over to another terminal in front of the device and tapped something.  The device sprouted smooth spidery claws, mechanical pieces that moved around and pinned him back, reinforcing the hold the cables had on him; it was meant for a fully-grown form, and engulfed him.  He tried to keep fighting until he ran out of energy; he slumped down into the restraints panting as the lines readjusted themselves, too tired to move, hurting all over.  He heard something dripping, and thought he may've managed to hurt himself on the device, but he wasn't sure how badly or where, and Garland wasn't reacting.

            "If you cease this chaotic behavior, you will be released early.  If you continue this, you will be retrained for the full two weeks.  You will not be allowed to cause damage to other systems."

            He glared up as ferociously as he could, snarling, still exhausted.  Garland walked back around the device and out; the door moved back into place and the lights dimmed back to almost nothing.  He dropped off to sleep not long after. 

            He woke up in a heap at the base of the machine.  The restraints were off, the cables and lines were out too, they had all retracted back into the machine.  He moved to sit up, then fell back as his right shoulder popped back into place with a snap.  Curled up now, he noticed that the side of his left leg from the knee down was bloodied where he'd accidentally torn it open on one of the edges of the restraints.  It was healing quickly; another day or so and there'd be no more sign than a scar.  He pulled himself up, sitting, wincing at all the aches, the stiff sore spots, the places where he'd pulled things fighting; there were a couple more snaps as his tail started quirking back into joint, leaving him wincing every time it moved.  He pulled up standing; the lights were on, dimly, although there was no sign of Garland.  

            Would he get in more trouble if he left?  Had Garland set it up to let him go, or had the device just malfunctioned and dropped him?  

            He crept over to the door, tapping at the pad next to the door; it didn't respond, but there was no jab of pain from the implant, so Garland must not've labeled this off-limits, assuming Garland knew he'd be able to move.  He tried it a couple more times, to no response, then finally went looking for a tool to open it with.  He found something suitable for prying it open, a flat blade that he didn't really want to think about much, and popped the cover off the mechanism beside the door.

            There was nothing there; he could see the connections where the cables had been unlatched and removed.  The entire device for opening the door had been taken out.  Either Garland had found a new way to keep him from leaving, or there was some kind of perverse test going on; either way, he wasn't going to spend one minute in this lab more than he had to.  

            The other doors out had all been altered similarly; the connections were still there, but the mechanisms had been removed.  Searching the lab, he found no sign of the missing door parts, although he saw more than he ever wanted to of the other machines in the lab, many of which were plainly meant for living things; this was one of the labs for bioengineering work and research.  The fact that the thrice-damned computer in the back of his head knew what most of them were didn't help; he really didn't want the fuzzy gaps filled in on things like the tools for dissection, not when he was locked down here as a specimen.  The more he found, the more he just wanted out.  

            He was finally left with no other real option than rebuilding the mechanisms from what was around the lab.  He set to digging out bits that'd been left there for maintenance on the other machines, and eviscerating a couple of the devices, to build a jury-rigged door mechanism.  Garland probably wouldn't appreciate the sabotage, but for the moment, he didn't really care.  

             It took him a few hours of work, focused entirely on what he was doing, but he got what he was fairly sure would be a working door mechanism.  He carried it and his makeshift tools over to the door, and quickly got it connected, then keyed in the exit code he'd set it to, holding his breath.

            The door schlicked open.  The corridor beyond was dark, and empty, and he saw a lift at the end.  He took off running towards it, finally free of the damned lab.

            Then the teleporter halfway down the hallway went off.  

            He was back in the middle of the lab.  The eviscerated machinery he'd just attacked for parts was to his right. The door was closed again, and the whole setup was seeming more and more like an elaborate rat-maze.  He took a deep breath and fought the urge to start screaming and ranting, figuring Garland was probably watching, or at least monitoring this somehow.  When the red quit creeping into the edges of his vision, he walked back to the door, and tried the exit code.

            Of course, it didn't open.  He picked up the tools and rewired it until it opened, then crept cautiously into the hallway, examining the walls to find the edges of the teleporter mechanism.  Once he'd found that, it only took him maybe twenty minutes to dismantle it and get past it.  

            And learned that the "lift" was actually another teleporter.

            He repeated much of the performance with another door out of the lab; while he didn't run into the hallway, the results were pretty much the same.  And the third door out.  And the fourth and last door out.  Then he started trying to rewire the lifts.  By this time it had been almost twelve hours since the "rat-maze" exercise had started.  The lifts turned out to be lacking the mechanisms necessary for them to work as such, and there was nothing in the bioengineering lab he could use to repair them.  The vents had been altered so he couldn't leave that way, and there weren't any crawlspaces anymore attached to much of the cabling and pipes.  He finally tried climbing one of the shafts upward, but the walls turned completely smooth about ten feet up, and he was too small to even consider chimneying up.  So he tried climbing the three others.  Which were exactly the same.

            In a control room somewhere, Garland was timing how long he'd keep at it until he gave up, monitoring things.

            He then returned to the lab, tearing into the machinery there with a vengeance.  It didn't seem like a destructive tantrum; it was too calculated, he was taking apart specific things, and he was actually taking them apart instead of just destroying them.  For several hours, it was impossible to tell what he was doing.  Then he managed to get one of the spidery restraints out of the device he'd been locked in earlier, and started working on converting it into something.  

            He had a mess of jury-rigged machinery in the middle of the floor that he attached it to; a power relay sparked, and it spasmed, locking around his arm, leaving him half-dangling.  At first he was fighting rather incoherently, ranting obscenities; if Garland hadn't known he'd been going through many of the old archives, he would've been surprised that the boy even knew language like that.  He managed to snag the scalpel he'd been using the entire day and a half or so with his tail, transferring it to his free hand and stabbing the joint; the machine went limp, dropping him unceremoniously.  With an irritated sigh and much grumbling, he set to repairing the joint, this time being much more careful not to connect any power relays until he'd figured out how to rewire the spider-leg to do something besides grab.  

            By the time he had that accomplished, it had drug out to thirty-six hours.  Another four hours went into pulling a second leg out of the original device, attaching it, and rewiring it.  By the time he had all four legs attached to the central mess, it had been fourty eight hours since the exercise started.  When the central pod was finished, it'd been a full fourty-eight hours. The spidery thing obediently followed him to the door, pulling itself through to fold down at the bottom of the shaft.  He hopped up onto the pod, clinging on to the top of it as the four legs started carrying it up the shaft, one leg at a time.

            A hundred feet up, a solid gate was closed across the shaft.  Kuja glowered up at it, and began working a spell, a lightning burst enough to blow the gate off.  The spell went off, but didn't blast open the gate; instead, the force reflected back downward, frying the device, shocking him, and sending both dropping to the bottom of the shaft.  

            Everything went fireworks inside his skull; when they cleared, his machine was ruined and burned out, the four legs all twisted in the shaft, with him in the middle.  The device had broken his fall, but everything was still pins and needles from the lightning zap; he was too fried to tell if he had managed to hurt himself in the fall.  He didn't move for a while, as the internal clock regained its bearings, resetting; by the time he felt like he could move again, it had been half an hour.  He curled around into a despondent crouch, then wove drunkenly back into the lab to try something else.  There was an odd buzzing sensation in his head that he couldn't figure out, and his mouth had gone rice-paper; he realized he didn't have anything to eat or drink.

            Kuja slumped against one of the tables, wondering if there might be anything he could eat in the lab - then remembering what the lab was, he didn't feel hungry anymore.  The sting from the electricity was dying down, but the buzzing hadn't gone away; it was coming and going intermittently, usually accompanied by the sensation of the world tipping a little.  He figured he could probably rewire the gateway at the top of the shaft if he could get up there again, but his spider-walker was destroyed; the innards had looked awful black and tar-ish when he'd left it.  He wasn't sure if he could salvage enough legs, or enough other bits and pieces, to build another one, which meant he was going to have to find another way up, unless he could somehow replace the cooked parts of the last one.

            He managed to walk a straight line as he went back to the open door, dragging the walker back in; now that it wasn't working, he realized it probably weighed half-again what he did.  He didn't bother checking how long it took to haul it back in, except that by the time he was done, he didn't feel like doing much more than draping limply over one of the stiff spider-legs for a few minutes.  He was half-tempted to fall asleep, but he pulled out of it, gathering his tools to try and repair and get out of the damned lab.  He didn't manage to stay awake more than another hour or so.

            When he woke up, he was in a small side room off the lab.  He noticed bandages under his shirt that hadn't been there before, and the itching sensation in lines along his back was worse.  He wasn't restrained, although the room was basically little more than four walls, a ceiling, a floor, and a door with no opening mechanisms on this side.  There was a small tray with a decent sized mug of water and bowl of the synthetic food facsimile.  He was feeling light-headed, and the world had gone even more wobbly while he'd been asleep.  He fell on the food and water with a complete loss of dignity, and it vanished far too quickly.  When it was gone, he was left looking up around the empty room, still feeling the aches and pains of the last few days, until he fell over on his back to wait for the vertigo attack to go away.  

            When the world settled down and quit spinning, he scrambled over to look for a way out, or something in the small room; there was nothing but the tray with the empty bowl and mug.  He spent a while tearing over the door looking for a crack, something he could work with, and finally just fell back into the far corner, waiting for something to happen.  He could just barely sense the scanning devices that were still running.  

            Again he was left trying to lose track of time and failing.  Hours passed; he was starting to doze off out of sheer boredom.  

            The majority of the two weeks passed with him simply locked in the basement being monitored, split between the small cell and finding himself stuck in one of the devices.  The things he had dismantled were slowly being repaired, not that it seemed to stop Garland from running tests on him.  By the time he needed to go back to Gaea, it was a bedraggled mess that wandered through the portal; he only knew where half of the new scars and marks came from, he was black and blue from his various attempts at escape.  The thin light of Terra half-blinded him; he knew he should've waited at the portal until his eyes had adjusted, but he was so sick of Bran Bal, Pandemonium, and Terra itself that he went straight through.  

            The light, noise, and aura were a bit much, and he sprawled out on the branch, waiting to adjust to it all, and for the various things he'd pulled to quit complaining.  Among all the other things going on, he noticed that he'd caught Leviathan's attention.  He poked out towards it, letting it catch the thread.  He wasn't sure how it was going to react, but didn't care.

            'What In Hades Name Happened To You?'  

            "Nothing.  It's nothing.", he mumbled, curling up on the root.  

            'Is This Why You Fear The Dark One?'  The sea-dragon was speaking cautiously, starting to sound sympathetic in spite of itself.

            He almost answered, then just stayed quiet, watching birds flitting through the branches.

            'Why Have You Not Attempted To Escape - Flee To Gaea, Away From The Dark One's Power?'

            "'Cause I can't.  He'll just track me down and I'll be in more trouble for running away."  He sat up, starting to feel a little better for having rested.  "I'll figure something out eventually."  

            The sea-dragon image settled out, coiled, making a low, uncomfortable rumbling sound.  Kuja cut the contact, stood up, and stalked off towards the tree itself.

*****   
...and exeunt Zidane. I don't know if he had a name then or not, and it certainly didn't come up here. .   
*****   
Out-Take #1 - inspired by caffiene and finishing this at 3 am. Killer mushrooms ate my brainmeats ^_^. 

  
(Kuja, working on the spider-climber-thingie, not even noticing a small green figuring entering after having gotten in (gotten out?) somehow, tailed by an even smaller robot...stops, looks up at the Irkhan Invader who's a good head shorter than him even at this age, and is puffing up and attempting to look important.)   
"...What're you doing here?"   
"I demand guidance to the exit, Terran worm-larva!"   
(Takes a couple, slow blinks) "Riiiighht. This thing only has room for one, and I'm not giving it to you - I'm getting out of here."   
(Nods smugly, then realizes the answer was not in the affirmative...) "Eeehh? You dare defy Zim?!"   
(Kuja, rather obviously not impressed, nods.)   
"You will rue the day you stood against Zim!! Gir, subdue this obstacle!"   
(Gir's eyes turn red as he salutes) "Yes, sir!" (Runs towards Kuja, stops a few feet away...eyes turn green again...as Gir pulls out a container of yoghurt, which he dumps on his head, then sticks the empty canister in his mouth, and starts beating both sides of his head while trying to sing something unintelligible around the yoghurt cup. Kuja and Zim have a brief staredown, only brief because Kuja promptly falls over and begins laughing himself fuzzy. Zim glances between the Genome and his supposed help, then at the spider-climber-thingie; the Irkhan shrugs, races over to the climber while Kuja's laughing helplessly, turns it on, and scrambles for the exit, calling for Gir, who bounds after in his usual insanity. There's the sound of an explosion, and the pair is gone for a full half hour before Kuja recovers enough to breathe.) 


	5. listen:there's a hell of a good universe...

Gomen ne for the long break; this is the first chapter I've got complete so far.  I have a couple others that are in dire need of some work that should be up soon hopefully (I'm also working on my other fics, which is a reason all of them are going slowly, as well as being in the middle of an army move).  Things are going to start picking up and catching up to events that'd be familiar in the game soon.

*****

pity this busy monster, manunkind - e.e.cummings

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not.  Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

-electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish

returns on its unself.

                                                     A world of made

is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones, but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence.  We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell

of a good universe next door;let's go

*****

            He was back in his room in the caves, sitting next to the nest of blankets, trying to attach a light-enchanted stone to the wall; the one cleft in the rock that looked like it would hold it was just barely out of his reach.  After ten minutes of hopping up and down trying to get it to stay, and getting bonked by the falling light-stone more than once, he stopped trying to put it in the cleft the normal way, and resorted to magic to lift the stone into place.  He was starting to focus more and more on learning magic; it had caught his attention in the old records of Terra, something lost in the ages since the original people that walked the world died, and whether Garland realized it or not, he was discovering a rather strong talent for it.  

            Just as the light settled into place, the small remote terminal he had to have there turned on, receiving a message.  The boy glowered, tail twitching, and turned slowly to the terminal; after checking on the Iifa system he'd taken a couple weeks to just spend time outside in the mountains, work on his lair in the cave, and generally stay away from most things Terran.  

            The message scrolled across a field generated above the small terminal.  The footnotes on the presence holding up the field that prevented foot or air travel to the Iifa Tree had been noted, and he was to investigate the "Summoners" it had referred to; preliminary scans had a point not far from his cavern as the most likely place for them to be, an area with an odd energy spike.  He was to try to be quiet about it.

            Of course nothing was said about how he was going to get there; the portal system was all well and good, but "being discreet" didn't quite work with portalling directly in, besides, the odd energy spike would probably disrupt it completely; it was difficult enough to pinpoint locations on Gaea with it.  He wasn't about to walk; he was made to survive, but a week across a monster-infested desert didn't sound like a bright idea, nevermind that he was still not full grown yet.  

            He sent a short message back to Terra, scribing glyphs on the screen.  "Need transportation.  Too far to walk."  The reply was equally short - "Busy.  Not enough time to look.  Your job.  Find solution."  The transmission cut off.  

            He had no authorization for the Terran ships, there was nothing in the Iifa tree he could get past Leviathan or the other outer field - like he'd *want* to ride something dead, anyway; there was nothing in the caves he could use, and around the caves was desert.  It had to be something from Terra, but something that wouldn't draw too much attention, and something he could get without getting in trouble.  It wasn't that he had a problem with disobeying Garland, but the thought of another couple weeks in the basement made him nauseous and light-headed on its own.  He didn't even like going back to Terra this soon after, but it didn't look like he had a choice.

            He sat, staring at the terminal for a long time in the dim light of the one lit stone, then grudgingly started skimming databases looking for anything he might be able to use, to work with.  Something that would fit on Gaea...

            He skipped across something, an edge of a file on the altered silver dragons that guarded the areas around Bran Bal against the demons and things that occasionally crept out of the shadows of the dead world.  Bits of old stories, things Garland held in archive only for the sake of preserving what remained of Terra; old legends and tales of great heroes on shining, silver-winged dragons, the genetic ancestors of the current guardian-dragons.  It was a lack of logic, a flight of fancy, and something Garland would never understand.  

            He keyed in to call the portal; he was going to get a dragon.

            Bran Bal was quiet, and he dodged through the genomes quickly, trying to pass through as quickly as possible.  They were beginning to creep him out; all identical, all with the same glass automaton stare; he knew he was supposed to be like them, and the thought of being that...soul-less scared him.  

            He left it behind, off along the walkways and paths over still water, the opposite direction from where he'd gone when he almost drowned.  Were there any more dragonflies still living on Terra?  It was probably more likely that it'd been something that slipped in through the portal from Gaea when Garland was visiting the Iifa system, something that hadn't lived more than a few hours past when he'd fallen into the water chasing it.  

            It was a half hour walk out to the spires of milk-crystal where there was a dragon nest that actually had a walkway to it.  The creatures were engineered, like the genomes, and in many ways were as much true dragons as the genomes were true Terrans - they had certain things hardwired into them, and among them was that they wouldn't harm Genomes; they were guardian beasts, servants.  He wasn't sure if that was part of the genetic alteration that allowed them to survive when the world was mostly dead, or if it was something older, something dating back to the faerie tales.  

            There was a full grown one, over thirty feet from its heavy muzzle to the tip of its tail, coiled around the spire; it stirred at his approach, locked charcoal black eyes on him, spread broad pinions and loomed over him.  He was staring up at it, mouth open, voice dead in his throat; it was a living thing, with beating heart and breath, it was huge, it had claws two thirds as long as he was tall, it could've easily rent him to pieces, and it was watching him - not regarding him as if he were the tasty tidbit the Abadon had made him out to be, but with a sort of puzzled look, as if it were in the middle of mistaking him for a demon, then shifted to bewilderment that something else living was out there.  The vast wings folded, the creature arched its neck over and down to the side of him, a cry rattling down into a sort of pondering rumbling noise.  Then it settled back, moving off the path, still watching him cautiously as he padded past it.  

            In an alcove in the rock behind it was one young enough to work with - a fledgling, wings still too small for its body, grown enough to be coordinated and large enough to carry someone but still young enough to have an air of awkwardness.  The creature made a sort of chirping sound as he walked in, scrabbling about to face him; it - he, the computer had said when he'd checked the map - was about as tall at the shoulders as a chocobo, although twice the size of the birds because of its build.  It had the same kind of quizzical look as the older one had, but there was more energy to this, more active curiosity than confusion.  There were pinfeathers peeking through the plumage in a few places on his wings, and some of his primary feathers were broken off due to youthful clumsiness; they were more white than the opal-silver of the older dragon, and softer around the edges.  

            He reached one hand out, tentatively, and started scratching the feathers along the lower edge of its jaw, crooning quietly in old Terran.  The language was part of the programming of any Genome, even though they spoke the language of Gaea as an odd sort of failsafe.  The dragon leaned his head into it, pushing against his hand, then moved forward, butting its head into his shoulder; he lost balance briefly, clutching at the creature's head and neck to stay standing.  

            He backed out of the alcove slowly, waving to the dragon to follow, still talking softly in Terran.  The dragon followed, slowly, haltingly, although its pace grew more even as he continued further; it was staring around the area and at him.  The mother dragon had backed out of his way, watching him warily the whole way out, but not interfering; this was their duty.  The young one had probably never been further than a few hundred yards from the nest.  Once they hit Bran Bal, Kuja broke into a run, the young dragon clattering along behind him; none of the genomes even looked up as they reached the portal and disappeared through it.

            The dragon stumbled as it hit the difference in aura, becoming a mismatched ball of claws, silk scales, and feathers tangled on the far wall trilling quizzically.  As it struggled to right itself, Kuja found himself laughing quietly...something he couldn't remember ever doing before.  A feathered head popped out of the tangle as the four claws found purchase in a ring around it, tail coiled up the wall, blinking around and still trilling, looking to him now and then as if seeking some kind of reaction.  He cocked his head right back, stepped forward to scratch the crests of feathers off the dragon's brow ridges; the creature settled into a coiled ball, calming.  

            He spent the rest of the day talking to the dragon softly, getting it used to him and the area, debating on a name for it.  At night, the dragon settled around his 'nest', one wing over him.  He fell asleep listening to the dragon's heartbeat and breathing, curled against it.

            The next morning, he led the dragon – Sondren -  down the ledges to the open sand, where it stopped, pawing at the sand, having never seen it before.  When it seemed comfortable, he put a hand on its shoulder.  It looked back quizzically, but didn't seem bothered.  He hopped up onto its shoulder; it squawked and shuffled, but didn't seem too upset.  He started gently urging it forward; it was confused at first, then started walking forward.  Sondren didn't seem bothered by his weight at all, and after a few minutes adjusting to the weight, it took off at a fast lope.  He was having to get used to the balance himself, and had his tail wound around the base of the dragon's left wing.  

            It was a three hour ride to the ridges overlooking where the city should be.  Going up the ridge, he could see along the sea cliffs; there was a walled city with high spires set out on the cliffs, that almost hummed with power; he could catch whispers of voices, of creatures like Leviathan lurking.  

            He rode down the ridge, switching back and forth through the rocks and occasional scraggly shrubs.  It was another half hour to the road to the city.  There were riders, travellers, and a few wagons coming and going.  He could actually sense auras, and there was actually people.  He didn't see anyone with a tail, although there were short green people and all the others had horns.  He realized, somewhere offhand, that Garland didn't have a tail either; it looked like it was only genomes.  He was suddenly glad it was out of sight.  Nobody else had feathers either, but he was used to that.  He was attracting some attention, but was being left alone.  Listening to conversations going by, he also realized he'd have a noticeable accent to a native speaker.  He also realized that the simple dusty blue tunic top and slacks were very out of place.  He'd expected passing off as an outlander anyway.  

            He passed through the gates amidst the talk of the travelers and the odd brogue of the dwarves; once inside the city, he dismounted, pausing to realize how stiff and sore he was; the long ride had even brought back some of the aches from his imprisonment.  

            When he started walking again, he almost tripped over something small dashing across his path with a fluttering sound.  Recovering his footing, he looked down at the small creature that had tripped; it was a white fuzzball with short pawed limbs, rubbing the back of its head.  It had pointed cat-ears, a kitteny face, and an odd red pom-pom hanging off its head that looked like a part of it; small purplish bat-wings were hanging off its shoulders.  It was looking up at him and the dragon, muttering to itself.  He kept hearing 'kupo' popping up.  

            He stared at the moogle.  The moogle stared at him.  This continued for a while.  The little creature had an odd and surprisingly strong aura that was very linked to the ambient energy of the land.  

            "What's kupo?"  

            The moogle blinked, looked at him and the dragon; he guessed it was a young one.  It scrambled, fluttering away with a long string of 'kupo's.  

            He continued walking, craning about at the spread of the city, his dragon obediently following.  He almost didn't notice that a tall middle-aged man in blue embroidered green robes, carrying a gem-scepter, with neat short brown beard and short hair had walked over, watching him.  

            "Excuse me."

            He started, turned, looked up at the older man, who got down on one knee to be somewhere close to eye level.

            "Where are you from, child?"

            "East."  He pointed off vaguely.  

            "Really...I wasn't aware there was anyone to the east."  He paused thoughtfully; Kuja could sense something in contact with him, an impression of blue and white fur, a wolf silhouette with a dragon's tail and a howling - then an impression of blazing golden eyes watching him right back.  

            "There's not much else out there.  Where is this?"

            "Madain Sari, the city of the Summoner Tribe.  Where is your family?"  

            He stared blankly.  "I don't have one."

            "Where do you live?"

            "East."

            "What tribe are you of?"

            He blinked, blankly.

            "You're neither summoner nor dwarf, that's obvious."

            He continued with the innocent act, pretending not to know what the man was talking about; he wasn't sure how to explain what race he was.

            "Here...let's get you and your beast out of the road."  He stood, motioning at Kuja to follow.  As they started walking, he turned to look down.  "What is your name, child?"  

            "Kuja."  He didn't see any danger to giving his name.

            "I am Solais, Summoner of Fenris."

Solais took him to a large place built into a cliff spire, some kind of large open monastery with vaulted ceilings, stained glass depictions of fantastic creatures; he saw Leviathan and Fenris among them.  The outside seemed closed into the cliff wall, warding off the chill breezes of the north, but inside it was open and airy, architecture that mixed the rough stone with carvings and depictions of the beings he'd been sensing.  He only saw the horned people about, most of them adults in embroidered robes, although here and there a few children and moogles darted through the halls.  A double door just to one side of the main entrance was flanked by two of the horned people in light armor with metal-capped staves; when he strayed that direction, Solais waved him back, looking up from talking to an older lady in silver and white robes.  The dragon was between them, twisting around to see and drawing quite a bit of quiet attention.  Solais and the older lady walked back, meeting him halfway at the dragon.

"This is Cassandra...she can see to your mount."  

The old lady half-bowed, started to reach towards the dragon, then stopped.  "No tack or bridle?"

He hadn't particularly thought about it, but it was a good idea now that she mentioned it, especially if he was going to take to the air when the dragon was older.  "No...I don't have anything like that."  

She gave him an odd look, then reached for the dragon again cautiously, muttering quietly to it; the dragon balked away, hissing a little.  Kuja put a hand up to the plumes on his neck, whispering in Terran that it was alright to go with her.  The dragon trilled, then calmed and followed her out.  

"You don't need to worry about it - Cassandra's been dealing with animals most of her life.  She's the Magus' summoner, and while she mostly works with horses and chocobos, she's dealt with gryphons and stranger before."  Kuja shrugged, staring after the gate she'd just gone out.  "Have you had time to eat?"

Kuja glanced back; again, he hadn't even thought about it.  "Not since before I left..."

"This way then; we should get you dinner."  

            Solais led him to a balcony overlooking the waterfall canyon; a round wooden table took up most of the small space, and bright flowerboxes lined the ivy-covered railing.  He was distracted by the bright purple and gold blooms; he'd never seen a flower like it up close and real before.  The dark leaves were thick and fuzzy; they were squat desert plants, from areas less desolate than his hideaway.

            "They're violets...rather finicky plants, but once they're growing, they survive well."  Kuja started, almost knocking over the chair; Solais was right behind him.  "It's alright; you just seemed fascinated by them."

            "Well...I've never really seen them this close before...not much grows where I live."

            "So you live out in antlion country?"  Kuja nodded quietly.  "Rather desolate...how do you survive out there alone?"

            What was he supposed to say?  "...I manage."

            Solais raised an eyebrow, starting to get an odd, thinking look that made Kuja nervous, but snapped out of it at a knock on the door into the cliff.  He opened it partway, taking a tray from someone Kuja couldn't quite see and thanking them.  He set the tray down, letting the door shut behind him.  

            There was some kind of small game bird roasted on the plate, covered in a brown sauce; next to it were a couple round white pudgy unfamiliar things that had sauce poured over them as well.  A brown ceramic mug was filled with clear, sharp smelling juice.  It was completely new to him; Bran Bal relied on fairly tasteless synthetics, and for the first time, he was faced with something that actually smelled like food. 

            He fell on it like a starved wolverine, not even caring to try and identify the thick, starchy white things; they were edible and that was all that mattered.  Solais, across the table, was just watching in stunned silence.  

            "Beg pardon....but may I point out...there is silverware on that tray...and you might want to use it."

            Kuja stopped eating briefly to glance down, scrub his hands with the cloth napkin off one side, and switch to using the silverware.   "Didn't have anything like this at home...", he mumbled around the food.  

            "So I'd guess.  You might want to slow down - you'll make yourself sick."

            It took an effort of will to follow that advice, but he managed, filling in the spaces with more questions.  "What are the little white creatures everywhere?"

            "Little white...bat wings and pom-poms?"  Solais mimed the dangling red puff in the beginnings of disbelief.  Kuja nodded.  "You've never seen a moogle before?"  The boy shook his head.  "How on Gaea...they're everywhere..."  The old summoner was faced with the old, by now cultivated kittenish fluff-for-brains halo.  "They're fae creatures, linked to the life force of this very planet; they live pretty much everywhere.  They're supposed to be lucky, and they're certainly very helpful; I think there's a few hundred or more in this city."

            "Didn't seem to like me."

            "Ah, Morgaine at the gate.  She said your aura was strange, that it clashed with the flows of energy, among other things, and she was startled - she'll probably be about to apologize sooner or later."

            Kuja suddenly slowed down with the food, distracted.  "What sorts of things did she say about my aura?"

            Solais chuckled, slightly nervously.  "She said it seemed empty, like there wasn't as much energy as there should be, and...well...static.  Artificial, she said.  It's probably just residue from wherever you were before."  

            He suddenly didn't feel hungry anymore; the spices and rich gravy seemed to lose their flavor, going cardboard, almost enough to make him nauseous.  

            "Are you alright?"  

            "'M fine..."

            Solais frowned, and reached across the table to put a hand on his shoulder; Kuja briefly flinched, reflexes expecting metal near-claws instead of a gentle touch.  "Don't let it bother you.  Fenris says it's mostly just the edges, and further in your aura's perfectly natural seeming, if a bit edgy and alien; your tribe's not anything we've encountered before, and there's bound to be misconceptions here and there."  

            He still wasn't very comfortable with the hand on his shoulder, and the vague, queasy feeling had yet to go away.  Unnatural, the moogle had called him.  How much could these people figure out from what they'd already noticed?  How long before the summoners connected him to Leviathan's warnings?  

            "Kuja?"  He glanced up; Solais looked worried, perturbed.  

            "It's nothing...I'm just tired...too long on the road."

            "I'll take you to a room where you can rest."

            Later that evening, Solais was out on another balcony, staring off over the waterfall, when Cassandra found him.  He was leaning on the railing, his scepter resting on a bench behind him, and he didn't even seem to notice her arrival.

            "The dragon's all settled in - curious beast, but perfectly friendly once he realized we were safe, although I think he still doesn't know what to make of the chocobo in the next stall."  She laughed, leaning over the railing a foot away.  "I'm curious where the boy got him - it's like that child stepped right out of the old tales of the Fair Folk."

            "I'm worried about him."

            "Well, he's got the attention of the moogles - I've heard plenty just being in the stables."

            "I don't think he's been alone all this time...."

            She glanced aside.  "Why the grave look, exactly?"

            "He flinched when I put a hand on his shoulder - like he expected to be struck...he's edgy when there's people about, edgier if he's asked even innocent questions...claims no family, owns nothing...I think we may have a runaway, one who's been abused."

            "It'd ken with what old Grimmaud said; he decided to have a glance at the boy after hearing the other moogles talk, and said some o'those wierd bits in his aura were...well, scars, is how he put it."

            "And what of Morgaine's comments?  That he doesn't feel like he's from Gaea?"

            "I was thinkin'...if ye want to take over later to show the boy around, I'll take breakfast in and see what the Sisters think.  They'd know more than any o'us mortals."

            Solais nodded.  "Thank you.  It's a sound idea, and I have a dispute among some of the fisherman to mediate."

*****

Aaah, the city of the Summoners, before the North Continent started getting trashed.  There's some gaps in the next chapter or so (while Madain Sari's still standing) – I'm debating whether to have "Sara" wander through somewhere in some regard; any comments on the idea?  (Sara = Garnet's original name, BTW.)


	6. The masquerade for Time's dead flowers

Many apologies for the late update. I've ended up moving to a new city, catching up on classes, and…well…generally having a lot to juggle, and neglecting a lot of my fanfiction work.

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Welcome my dear, please take my hand

It's wonderful here

It's really quite grand

The moment still, await the hour

The Masquerade for Time's dead flowers - Through the Pale Door, Faith and the Muse

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Before sunrise, Cassandra left her room over the stables, dressed in her ceremonial silk robes that cascaded with flowers. She carried with her only a lantern and a staff topped by a disc of inlaid stones, forming three flowers. One old moogle stirred at her passage and fluttered out to follow, mousy grey streaks beginning to show in his white fur; he fluttered behind her shoulder quietly. Together they went down a secret stair to a passage under the city wall, away from the gates. There was a barely visible pathe worn into the rock, curving away from the city into a forest dancing with will'o'wisps.

At the trees, the path became a deer-trail; the deer-trail led out to a clearing ringed by two foot tall mushrooms with spotted caps. Grimmaud settled on one of the mushrooms, while Cassandra turned off the lantern, setting it outside the ring. Staking her staff in the ground, she pulled out an ornately carved wooden pan flute, inlaid with moonstones. Standing in the ring, she started piping a tune, a hymn that spun into a fast reel; she kicked up into a dance as she played. The flowers in the ring bloomed as if it were daytime, three of them sprouting out into broad blooms; the petals opened as Cassandra fell back into the grass, gasping for breath.

"You're not as light on your feet as you used to be.", came a sympathetic, childlike voice from one of the blooms.

"I'm getting older, I'm afraid...bones creaking and all." She struggled to sit up, as a slender, graceful hand extended down from a second bloom to help her up; a reddish mantis-blade extended back from the wrist. "Thank you, Sister."

"What is it you seek, Lady Summoner?", spoke the mantis-sister.

"I seek answers to some very odd questions."

"These are odd times.", came a voice from the third bloom. "We think it wise to send someone south, to investigate the demon-mist coating that continent."

"Aye, agreed, and I'll take it to the council m'self, but that's not what I came to ask."

"Then ask.", said the little wasp-sister with a giggle.

"A boy wandered into the city - near a youth, the years of leaving childhood behind - who seems something fae, yet also hiding much."

The mantis-sister sat back on her bloom as if it were a throne. "Describe this boy."

"He's a little tall for his young age, but clearly not full grown. He dresses in plain blue clothes of unfamiliar cut, and rode into town on a silver dragon - a dragon with shimmering feathers. He's of no tribe we know; clearly a human tribe, but he has a furred cat-tail, bright violet cat's eyes, and in place of hair, he has silver feathers the like of his beast, with a crest like the little parrots of the forests. Grimmaud saw scars in his aura, deep rents; he claims no family, refuses all questions, and flinches at a touch. Be he one of yours that some fool mortal summoned for ill use?"

The mantis faerie frowned deeply, staring into the distance. "Nay, lady summoner...we know not of that tribe, nor have we lost any children requiring vengeance. You say his dragon wears feathers?"

"Aye, silver feathers with opal shimmers."

"Then he is not of Gaea; no Eidolon of our world will know him. Such beasts are known; they've appeared from the road of the dead on the Shimmering Isle, interbred with the red wyrms of Mount Gulug. We would guess your lost child comes from whatever underworld awaits at the other end. The Bishop of Esto Gaza hears the voices of the Path of Souls; mayhap he would know something?"

Cassandra sighed. "Thank ye, Honored Sisters. I will do as you ask regarding the south, and seek my answers with the Bishop as you advise."

The mantis stood and bowed. "Live well, Lady Summoner." The three sisters vanished in a swirl of flower petals. Cassandra and Grimmaud were left alone in the circle of mushrooms.

"We should've known; I told you his aura wasn't of Gaea."

"Aye, Grimmaud...he's not even from the realms of the Fae, it seems. We should go back, tell Solais what we've found, and arrange our trip to Esto Gaza."

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After sunrise, Kuja tweaked awake at a rapping at the door of the room he'd been given in one of the towers. At first, he just sat partway up, staring at the door quizzically; a few feathers drifted away. He huffed, running a hand through the feathers; several more came out in his hand, the mark of the perpetual minor molt he seemed cursed with. The knocking at the door started again, and this time he heard Solais's voice outside; "Kuja? Are you alright?"

He shivered at a draft from the window, and snagged his shirt with one hand. "I'm fine, I'm just getting dressed." It was almost painful to crawl out of the warm, soft, actual bed, and he was beginning to be quite uncomfortable with the uniform of Bran Bal. He stopped halfway through getting dressed at an insistent itching, lurching over to the dresser mirror to worry at the emerging pinfeathers until the sheaths quit bothering him.

He opened the door once he felt presentable; Solais handed him a large hard roll. "Good morning. Did you sleep well?"

He restrained the urge to attack the roll, eating with a bit more dignity. "Yeah…thank you."

"I thought I might show you the city, seeing as it seems you have no pressing business."

Solais was making his job easier. "That would be appreciated." He finished the roll, half-consciously curling his tail along to his ankle. "What's this building?"

"This is the main temple of our tribe, the Summoners. This is where we honor the Eidolons that aid us."

"The Eidolons?" He looked up in his best look of innocence.

"Come; I can explain as we walk." Solais gestured, and he followed down the stairs of the tower, past landings lit through by more stained glass windows that Solais gestured to as he spoke. "There are spirits through everything in this world, spirits that most are not aware of, save some exceptional holy folk and truly great mages; we of the Summoner tribe are gifted to hear and speak to the spirits, as the Burmecian tribe speaks to dragons, the Cleyrans to the winds and elements. The Eidolons are the greatest of the spirits, the lords of the spirit realm, and they made an ancient pact with our tribe, allowing us to call upon their power and gain their aid; in return, we are the stewards of our world, ever working to protect Gaea and her creatures."

Kuja watched the stained glass as it passed; a great dark dragon, an emerald furred fox/rabbit with a gemstone in its forehead, a massive horned beast wreathed in flames. "So they're linked to the sources of magic?"

"They are the sources of magic."

Kuja fell silent as they neared the great hall, pondering the older summoner's words. The history archives had a footnote about a similar tribe on Terra, so long dead that nothing remained and their very existence had been believed to be myth. They could be his greatest threat or his only chance.

Just at the door to the great hall, the silver-haired old woman from the stables met them; Solais asked him to wait there, then stepped around the corner, talking quietly to her. Kuja slunk against the edge of the doorframe, where he could listen without being seen.

"Well...did you find out anything?"

"He's not fae; the Sisters said he wasn't one of theirs, wasn't familiar to them at all."

"So...nothing?" Solais's voice dropped.

"Nay, they had a few things to say - dragons like his have been seen in a couple odd places; they directed me to ask the Bishop. They also had another request of us."

"Oh?"

"The demon mist on the south continent has gotten worse; they ask that we investigate." His chest tightened; if they investigated, they'd figure out the Iifa system for sure.

"Perhaps you can look into both; there's no one else I'd trust with something like this."

"Aye, I'd be glad to, but I'm too old to travel alone."

"Not polite to be droppin' eaves, boy." Kuja jumped at the gruff voice practically in his ear, crest feathers straight as an exclamation point; he turned fast, face-to-face with a greying old moogle.

"I wasn't - I was just waiting..."

"Kupo, and the bright thing in the sky is just a firefly. Now if y'don't mind, how'd y'come to this city, eh?"

"I was riding, and I saw the city. I came in to see what was here."

Grimmaud fluttered closer, studying him from an inch away; he flattened back against the wall, his crest flattening as well. The moogle looked him over grumpily, then flitted back. "Hrph...well, yer welcome in this city, s'long as y'don't start trouble. Name's Grimmaud, kupo, I'm 'bout the oldest thing 'round here."

"How long do moogles live?"

The old moogle chuckled. "Long. Kuja, 'tis, right?"

"Yes."

"Y'got a last name?"

The slow, clueless blink was getting to be entirely too much of his repertoire.

Grimmaud shook his head with a disgusted, "Kupoo...Ah, well, no family, no family name, makes sense I s'pose."

"Grimmaud? You coming to the docks?"

"Right there, Cass." Grimmaud nodded to Kuja and flittered out to Cassandra as Kuja rejoined Solais.

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"You seem to be doing alright with the boy, Grimmaud.", Cassandra commented as they wound to the docks.

"Actually, there's somethin' bugging me about him...just wasn't bout to say it to his face, 'specially not if I saw what I thought I saw." The moogle glanced slyly back at the temple.

"Oh? And what would that be?"

"Well, first off, he's too damn kupo clueless. Newborn kits have more wits about'em...no...he's got wits, plenty I'd say, wits he hides, it's experience he's missin'."

"If he truly is from beyond the Shimmering Isle, then which of us can say what things were like there?"

"Doesn't quite explain why he's so cagey...there's fire behind those eyes, an' scars. Mark my words, he's got the potential in'im to be dangerous."

"If he's been abused, we should help him instead of condemning him." She wagged a finger as if chastising him.

"I'm as much fer helping as the next guy, but I'll eat my pom-pom if'n he hasn't seen fourteen summers, an'if abuse is all he's known, it'll be deep in'im...sometimes, scars that deep, they rot at a creature 'til there's nothin' left but pain an'hate, an'they turn on everything."

"Grimmaud!" The summoner stopped dead in the middle of the street.

"What's the most feared of the Forbidden Eidolons that hasn't been bound?"

She started to lecture, then thought. "Anima...the incarnation of pain." She started walking again. "I don't see how you can be so suspicious when he hasn't been here nigh a day."

"That's the other thing...afore I started talking to'im, he was listening in. Didn't pay much mind 'till ye mentioned the Mist, then he got all intense, all ticking crest feathers an'glarin' off with the wheels grinding in his skull; practically landed on his shoulder n'he didn't notice."

"You think he knows something?"

"Bet my wings he does, an' bet my eyes he'll deny it. Best to look into it, talk to the Bishop, 'n confront 'im with evidence, kupo."

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Barely a minute after they left the temple, Kuja started feeling self-conscious; curling his tail out of the way, worrying the hems of his shirt, and brushing his feathers out of his face whether they were in his eyes or not. The more variety he saw in the clothes around him, the rich colors and designs, the more he fretted at the plain dusty uniform and tried to disappear into Solais's shadow as the Summoner talked about the shrines and offices between the temple and the city square. He was startled when Solais stopped, although he realized he should've expected it; the Summoners were sharp, and he'd been acting suspicious.

"Keep picking threads on that shirt, and you'll wind up wearing nothing."

"Eh?" He pulled back to his innocent act.

"You keep fretting at it. Is something wrong?"

"It's all I have...and it stands out here."

"Do you have any Gil?"

The word was completely unfamiliar. "Any what?"

"I take that as a no...I'll pay for things while you're here, at least until you can take care of yourself."

He realized Solais had been referring to currency; dredging up archives, he really should've expected that to be a problem, although he hadn't exactly been given time to prepare.

As they moved more into areas with traffic, he started drawing attention again; his tail ticked when he wasn't consciously hiding it, and his crest started flattening down as he ducked to try and be out of view as much as possible. He was almost clinging to the back folds of Solais's robe, feeling all eyes on him as it was sinking in just how many people were around him.

"I suppose you'd want to find a change of clothes first, eh?"

He nodded up at Solais.

"This way then."

Solais led off down several roads that wound around; he managed to keep a sort of map drawn out in the back of his mind, but most of his concentration was on avoiding drawing attention, which he was failing miserably at. There were fewer people on some of the side streets, which actually seemed to make it worse; with fewer stalls and crowding, the area was more open, and they stood out more. Finally, Solais led him indoors in a small shop off two blocks to the side of the main street, with clothes hanging along the walls and from the ceilings in patches of every cut and color, sized for more than one race; there were a few where he couldn't identify what they'd been made for.

"Dorian?", Solais called toward the back of the shop.

A thin middle-aged man with graying hair and a perpetual nervous tic ducked out from a curtain that divided the front of the shop from the back. "Yesyesyes?"

"I have someone in need of your services; he's been living by himself, and just came in from the wastelands. I'll cover the bills." He nudged Kuja's shoulder with one hand, gently pushing the boy out in the open, from hiding behind him. "Kuja?"

He started, a slight twitch.

"I have something I need to go do for a little while. Dorian will see to getting you a change of clothes; I should be back in an hour or so." Kuja's expression turned more suspicious. He had no way of knowing what Solais was doing; if the Summoner suspected anything, he could be walking straight into a trap. "You'll be safe here, don't worry."

"Where are you going?" He edged closer, trying to play up the idea that he was afraid of being left alone.

"The docks; there's a dispute over fishing rights, it's been a lean year for the fisherman and they're starting to cast nets on top of each other in places. Nothing exciting, I'm afraid, and I'd rather not subject you to that kind of petty bickering." He patted Kuja on the head, a couple loose feathers drifting to the ground. "I'll be back soon enough." He turned and walked out.

Kuja eyed Dorian suspiciously. Dorian eyed Kuja appraisingly.

"Well then…First things first." The tailor produced a length of measuring tape, a small black book, and a stick of charcoal, and before Kuja could reach a second confused blink, Dorian had already caught his right wrist, lifted it up, and made it rather clear he was to hold that pose, measuring from the base of his neck out to his wrist. "What sort of thing y'be wanting?", he said, as he was doing the same to the other arm.

"Eh…I…" The tailor was busily attacking him with the tape measure, taking down notes and mumbling things Kuja couldn't quite catch occasionally. "Don't really…as long as I don't….stick out so badly…." He started twisting around to try and keep an eye on the tailor continually, no easy task, until Dorian clucked at him in annoyance.

"Sit still, boy! You'll throw the measurements off if you keep squirming!"

His tail was twitching, almost to lashing. There was no way he could've held it still, not while he was being measured, poked, and prodded like this. He was starting to tense up even while holding still, a low, involuntary growl starting somewhere in his chest; at least he was usually sedated for this in Pandemonium.

"Well, you've got to have some preferences, right? Color, cut, any special requests?" Dorian paused, kneeling behind him, to cluck at the tail. "Accommodating this should be interesting…"

"Can you hide it?" He blurted out the request almost before he'd consciously thought about speaking.

"Hmmm?" The tailor paused again, even the nearly perpetual twitch.

"Can you make something that'll cover it or something?"

"Odd request. It'll be awkward to make something comfortable that'd hide this, would probably have to be some kind of longer overcoat or something."

"I don't really care, I just don't want it to be seen." He was getting an odd, scrutinizing look that made him uncomfortable. "I don't want to stick out that much."

"Well, you're always going to stand out, not much that can be done for that, but I should be able to do the rest of it fairly easily, with a bit of finagling. Might even have something here I can alter; light colors, yes, dark and you'd look like the walking dead, light colors…" The tailor trailed off into muttering, double-checking measurements, then disappeared into the back behind the curtain with a "wait here."

He could hear the man at work, scissors on cloth and a constant stream of quiet mumbling; the outer room was almost claustrophobic in way the walls were covered, the cloth everywhere muffling sound so that the shop seemed to be cut off from the rest of the city except for the vague pulse of auras. He was almost afraid to pay too much attention to that, lest he get the attention of one of the Eidolons. After ten minutes, he took to studying the clothes hanging on the far wall; there was more color in just this room than he'd seen in most of his life on Terra. Twenty minutes, and he was counting stitches on the embroidery on the edge of the coat on the other side of the room. Half hour, he'd started sifting through what was hanging on the wall behind him.

After almost an hour Dorian emerged, proudly carrying a mass of white, grey, and purple cloth over one arm. He handed the folded pile to Kuja, and ushered the boy back to the curtain. "Go on, go on, let's see you get changed…"

He left Kuja just behind the curtain, retreating out of sight to the main room. Kuja stared at the curtain, then at the folded clothes, then at the back room; it was a mess of spools, bolts of cloth, various tools, scissors, and sewing needles, all centered on one narrow table. Laying out the clothes, there was light grey undershirt, a white overcoat with grey and purple trim and edges that would go almost to his ankles, and a pair of white slacks with trim cut and embroidered to match. He almost hesitated to change; as much as he despised the blue uniform, it had become familiar.

The main door opened while he was fumbling with the buttons on the overcoat; there was some kind of quiet exchange between Solais and Dorian that he couldn't quite make out, but it didn't sound like anything threatening. Everything was weighted differently from what he was used to; it wasn't uncomfortable, but it was definitely alien, and he could feel his tail brushing the back of the overcoat. Glancing up at the mirror on the far wall, he had to take a second to recognize his own reflection, he'd grown so used to the blue. His tail was completely hidden, and he almost didn't look like one of the genomes anymore.

A deep breath, and he brushed the curtain aside. Dorian was positively beaming, and Solais nodded approvingly. "Everything fit alright?" He sounded more like he was affirming than asking.

"Yes…it's fine."

"Now you shouldn't have to worry about standing out quite so much.", Solais commented quietly; Kuja nodded, and walked toward the door.

"What about your old things? Aren't you forgetting them?"

Kuja stopped by Solais, and looked back over one shoulder at the tailor. "I don't care…get rid of them or something. I don't want them."

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I know I'd planned to get further in Madain Sari than this, but I figure it's been long enough without an update, and this seemed like a decent enough point for a chapter break. Many thanks to the reviewers; I've never had a worshipper before.


	7. Death of innocence

Yes, I live, and have survived Geek Squad! And I'm not thinking about how long it's been since I last updated. O.o Ahem – anyway, yeeah...moving onward, now that I have free time and Featherboy is sitting still again.

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These latter days – they bear eternal winter's coming frost

And the death of innocence

In this dying age, we wander lost

Deny the hand of man – Hand of Man, Faith and the Muse

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Cassandra crossed the docks to a ship being loaded with supplies and cargo, Grimmaud following behind; the Devil's Luck was a lighter caravel that usually only did trade-runs on "off months" when there wasn't "more interesting things" to be off chasing. She calmly waited by the gangplank for some of the sailors to notice her and start hollering for the First Mate.

This accomplished a dark-haired head turning to note that yes, she was on the dock, and then dashing below decks. Grimmaud found a convenient barrel to keep between himself and what was coming.

"TREVOR NICODEMUS CAROL GET BACK OUT HERE!!"

One of the other sailors knelt by the door to below decks, then yelled back, "He says he's not here!"

She stalked up the gangplank muttering under her breath. "Lousy hare-brained boy...not sure I want to know what he THINKS I'm here for this time..." She stood just behind the other sailor, glowering at the door. The sailor nodded to her, then cracked the door just enough to whisper, "It's safe...she's gone now."

The door swung open, and Trevor got all of three feet before he spotted Cassandra. "Eep! Mom! I can explain everything really-"

"Cut yer blathering, I'm on an errand from the Sisters – I need to get to Esto Gaza to speak to the Bishop, and mayhaps see if I can get a ship from there to the south."

He trailed off, blue eyes blinking. "You mean you didn't hear about-" He broke into a blatantly faked grin, trying to recover dignity. "Well, then, I hear Ganja's headed out that way in a month, I'm sure you've got a lot to sort out before you go..."

Cass arched one eyebrow. "Already sent a moogle ahead to speak to your captain when I heard you were leavin' for that direction today. Yer father's going to be takin' care of the grove while I'm away."

"...eeeheh welcome aboard?"

-----------------------------------------------------------

The city seemed to be even more of a whirl of color and voices after leaving the muffled quiet of the tailor's shop; according to Solais's commentary, there was also a market in that area that'd been gathering accounting for the extra bustle. As he adjusted to the noise, he started noticing some details – it wasn't just the summoner tribe at the market, although they were certainly a large part of it. There were more of the short green folk, introduced to him as dwarves; other people like the summoners but without horns, of varying dress styles and a list of origin-names; moogles coming and going every which way; a few tall, slender lizardlike people that Solais explained as "Vices" and seemed to edge away from distastefully. He still caught glances his direction and quizzical looks, but there didn't seem to be as many. The wares themselves were almost an overload, and the only thing he could find in the archives of what he'd read he could fall back on were old litanies of treasure-troves. That ran thin as he started finding things that weren't old treasures but weren't things there'd ever been a "need" for in Bran Bal – household dishes and wares of different colors and kinds, furniture, and animals alongside silks, jewels, and treasures. Several times Solais had to tug on his sleeve to prevent him getting lost in the crowd.

Somewhere in between being distracted by a booth of gems and jewelry and another of caged birds, lizards, and small pets, it registered that Solais wasn't close by anymore. The sheer number of -people- and auras threatened to overload when he tried to get his bearings – if he moved on, he'd only end up even more lost. If he waited, either Solais would come back looking for him, or eventually the crowd would thin and he'd have an easier time finding his own way; he took a couple deep breaths until he could feel the nervous tic in his tail and crest-feathers die down, and then started taking another look around the stalls in that corner of the market.

He'd knelt down by a booth of toys of different kinds – painted wood, some clockwork trinkets, and stuffed-plush fabric animals, when Solais found him. He didn't even notice the summoner at first, he'd gotten so intent on some of the stuffed toys, picking up and looking them over.

"Don't tell me you've never seen a stuffed animal before."

Kuja twitch-jumped, tensing, and then forced himself to relax. He hadn't, outside of dim reference in some old records. Several possible responses flickered through his head to play it off, but he opted for half-honesty. "There isn't much out there."

Solais chuckled quietly and shook his head. "You've been turning that one over for five, six minutes now."

His crest-feathers dipped slightly. It wasn't exactly the most elaborate one there – a pink "rabbit" with ears different lengh, thread-sewn black eyes that mismatched in size, a squarish head with no mouth but two buck-teeth, stubby limbs, and a poof of fake fur for a tail; it'd only stuck out because it was that haphazard looking, although the stitching seemed solid. "...Ah...yes...it...stuck out." He glanced down at it briefly and then realized there were a few people including the merchant watching him.

Solais stepped around him and had an exchange with the merchant that got lost in the noise and in trying to think of a way to get people's attention elsewhere, or at least to try and seem more "normal". He almost forgot he was still holding the stuffed rabbit until Solais patted him on the shoulder with a clear nudge toward leaving.

"Let's move on then." Kuja took a step forward and then looked back down at the plushie. "Don't worry about it; it's yours."

He looked down at the rabbit, then back at Solais who'd started into the crowd and then halted, waiting. "Come again?"

"Think of it as a gift."

Another glance at the uneven rabbit and he bit back a sarcastic "Thank you, my life wasn't complete without a misshapen rabbit-thing". He was here on their courtesy and this gesture was part of it, after all. "...ahm...thank you."

The small tour stopped to catch rolls for lunch, then wound past the docks and back through a quieter area of houses on the way back to the main temple complex. He'd trailed off paying much attention; it was a large, prosperous city in an area that seemed peaceful – that alone made it a target.

Then he was distracted by a pair of much louder energy-shapes ahead down the road.

It was a building under construction; a stone arch was being raised, the two sides of it being supported not by scaffolds, but by a blue-furred minotaur, calmly using each huge hand as a support for the two halves while a slightly smaller one was helping the builders move the keystone into place. The aura-patterns were definitely not the same as any of the other people about, and they were producing energy at a rate such that it was leaking out into the entire area; he doubted they were even so much solid creatures as manifestations of earth and stone, massive presences beyond their physical stature. The one acting as a support nodded patiently to Solais as they passed. Kuja wasn't so much struck by the scene as by the potential; an earthquake spell from one of those, with the power they were producing, would level an entire section of the city.

"Those are the Brothers; their Summoner works as an architect primarily, and they've helped with some large-scale projects that would've taken years to finish without them – this city lives because of our bonds with the Eidolons."

The summoners, and this city, were definitely the source of the energy-spike that had registered to Pandemonium; not only as a potential threat, but seeing the effect the Eidolons had on the energy system around them...it had likely been slowing the systems for a very long time now.

- - -- -------------

He'd been given a seat at a long table for dinner, with many of the higher-ranking summoners and their families; it was lively, and there was enough energy in the room to make his head buzz as he tried to track the conversation and get an idea what was normal. Now that he was getting used to reading the patterns of an Eidolon next to the patterns of a normal soul, every one of the Summoners had at least some structure where they carried part of the Eidolon's power and spirit with them, an anchor for the Eidolon and a symbiotic link; the younger ones it seemed to flux between different Eidolons, while just about all of the older ones it seemed to stabilize around one or two strong bonds. The scale of what Garland was asking of him sunk in; he was going to have to destroy this place, and he doubted any of the Summoners would go down without a fight, not when they were bonded to the gods themselves.

He'd gone back to being lost in thought on his way back to his room, when he was startled out of it by someone calling his name – Solais; who had apparently followed him from the dining hall.

"Is something bothering you? You've been preoccupied half the day."

"It's nothing; this is just far more people than I'm used to."

Solais tilted his head to one side, studying him. "Are you sure about that?"

Kuja's feathers ticked; he wasn't sure what he'd walked into. "Yes...I'm sure."

"If there is anything wrong...I can't help you if you don't let me know you need it." Worry – he was being studied with concern. Something turned over uncomfortably in his throat at the offer; it was the first time he'd been offered kindness, and from someone he was there to kill – the sudden placement of a name, a face, and a soul to the idea of being the "Angel of Death". Would Solais have made the offer if he knew why Kuja was there, that he'd come because Madain Sari had registered as a threat to -

A threat to Garland.

There was enough power in the room he'd just left to easily overpower Pandemonium if it came down to a direct confrontation; he knew Garland planned to kill him eventually, so he had no reason to hold to his mission out of loyalty – he could tell them everything, the Iifa tree, Oilvert and the mirror-castle, the Shrines, the entirety of the system that was warping Gaea and draining the life out of it to feed the mostly-dead remains of Terra; they would be capable of doing something about it, and had already offered treating him like a living, thinking being -

but all it would take would be Garland thinking two words to the main computers of Pandemonium at the first hint that Kuja had turned on him, which would be obvious if the Summoners suddenly started taking apart the Terran machinery. As long as the killswitch and other control mechanisms existed, betraying Terra would be a hollow act of defiance; he needed some way to interrupt that control and a plan.

"Thank you for your concern...I'll be fine."


End file.
